Religion

Cornell William Brooks, Hauser professor of the practice of nonprofit organizations and professor of the practice of public leadership and social justice at Harvard University, and Kathryn Sikkink, Ryan family professor of human rights policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, discuss what the United States could do at home to bolster its credibility and influence when addressing human rights violations abroad. This meeting is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program. FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Social Justice and Foreign Policy webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. As a reminder, this webinar is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org, and on our iTunes podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. So we’re delighted to have Cornell William Brooks and Kathryn Sikkink with us today to talk about America’s Human Rights Credibility Gap. We’ve shared their bios with you, so I’ll just give you a few highlights. Reverend Cornell William Brooks is the Hauser professor of the practice of nonprofit organizations and professor of the practice of public leadership and social justice at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also director of the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at the school’s Center for Public Leadership, visiting professor of the practice of prophetic religion and public leadership at the Harvard Divinity School, and visiting professor of social ethics, law, and justice movements at Boston University’s School of Law and School of Theology. And he’s the former president and CEO of the NAACP in addition to being a civil rights attorney, and a fourth-generation ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. So let me turn now to Dr. Kathryn Sikkink. She is Ryan Family professor of human rights policy at the Harvard Kennedy School where she works on international norms and institutions, transnational advocacy networks, the impact of human rights law and policies, and transitional justice. She’s the author of many publications, including Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics, and she recently just authored—co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, “Practice What You Preach.” She has been a Fulbright scholar in Argentina, and a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a member of many organizations including the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and CFR. So thank you both for being with us today. We really appreciate your taking the time to discuss this very important topic. So I thought I would first turn to you, Reverend Brooks, to talk about America’s failure to resolve domestic human rights issues and how that’s affecting our credibility abroad. BROOKS: So let me just begin with a word of appreciation to you as our moderator, to my colleague, Professor Sikkink, and to everyone who is a part of this meeting, this conversation. So in answer to your question of America’s failure to address domestic human rights abuses and its impact on our credibility, I’m reminded of a hero of the American civil rights movement, a pioneering intellectual by the name of W.E.B. Du Bois, and as president and CEO of the NAACP, I literally sat under a picture of him at his desk, at my desk. And the reason I think about W.E.B. Du Bois in this moment in answer to your question is I think about 1947 when W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a petition, or what he called an appeal to the world entitled, “A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities and in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress.” So this sixth chapter appeal prepared over the course of a year prophetically foretold, if you will, two issues that are at the heart of your question, namely, voting rights and policing. That is to say, racialized violence. So the response to your question is both substantive and symbolic, which is to say if we think about two images, if we think about the image of George Floyd lying on the concrete in Minneapolis with Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck, and when we think about the insurrectionists storming the Capitol of the United States of America, these images are metaphors for human rights violations in this country. So when we think about George Floyd in this viralized video that took place in emotional slow motion that was pornographically violent, that, literally, spoke to the world in terms that are measurable. So in the midst of generationally unprecedented activism, we saw 26 million Americans take to the streets all across the length and breadth of this country in protests, demonstrations, and rallies in which they lifted up the moral assertion that Black lives matter, and in these protests, the majority of protesters were not, in fact, Black. There were millions more around the world. They were, literally, protesting, demonstrating, in support of Black lives, painfully and poignantly aware of the fact that young Black men are twenty-one times more likely to lose their lives at the hands of the police, painfully and poignantly aware of the fact that police homicide is such a commonplace and horrific tragedy that it is a leading cause of death, and that in this country, certainly, a thousand people or more lose their lives at the hands of the police, disproportionately Black folks—Black men—but not exclusively. Now, the reason why this speaks to the world in terms of human rights violation is, certainly, spoken well and eloquently in the U.N. High Commissioner’s report on human rights, particularly with respect to Black folks. So, in other words, this report by the High Commissioner catalog in a discursive and in-depth way America’s glaring and apparent hypocrisy, right. So, in other words, when you ask the question has our credibility been affected, when W.E.B. Du Bois wrote his appeal to the world there were not 26 million people paying attention to his appeal. In fact, his appeal was sold by the NAACP in little pamphlets for $0.50 apiece. Americans and people across the world watched the George Floyd video at no cost. So this is a metaphor. When we think about voting rights, so across this country, across a lithograph of this republic, we have seen in the wake of Shelby v. Holder, the Supreme Court decision hobbling the Voting Rights Act, literally, a Machiavellian frenzy of voter disenfranchisement, we’ve seen not only Black people disenfranchised but young people disenfranchised, people with disabilities disenfranchised. And so America is in the posture and the position of preaching democracy abroad when our democracy is fundamentally flawed, fundamentally broken at home, and in a way that is glaring. The insurrection becomes a metaphor—that image becomes a metaphor of the degree to which we have ignored voter suppression, lifted up the myth of voter fraud in ways that, literally, destabilize our democracy and pose a threat to the peaceful transfer of power. So in answer to your question about our credibility, think about W.E.B. De Bois back in 1947. Think about the image of George Floyd and the image of the insurrections in answer to your question abundantly so, glaringly so. And so the question for us is not the degree to which our credibility has been impacted and affected. The issue for us is what will we do. How will we respond? FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. And, Dr. Sikkink, I’m going to pass it over to you to talk about how should we respond. And I know, Reverend Brooks, you can also comment on this because I think it’s really important to talk about what we can do in our communities to bolster our credibility at home so that we can go about foreign policymaking around the world or holding up our values of human rights. SIKKINK: So, first, let me just echo the thanks to Irina and the Council for this invitation, to say what an honor and pleasure it is, as always, to be speaking along with my colleague, Professor Brooks, and to be speaking to such a distinguished audience. Irina sent ahead the list and it’s really such a pleasure to speak to such a great audience. So I wanted to—I was so happy that Professor Brooks started with this story of the Du Bois petition because this talk we’re having today doesn’t begin now. It didn’t begin in the 21st century. It begins, really, almost with the formation of the United Nations when—and particularly during the period of decolonization when the delegates were arriving from newly decolonized countries around the world, including in Africa and Asia, and they encountered racial discrimination and prejudice as—in New York City as they searched for housing and as they traveled in the United States. And so the U.S. government was already aware that our credibility was at risk because of our domestic racial injustices. And just as the situation today, this was an ethical issue then, it was a political issue, and it was perceived as a national security issue because it was the midst of the Cold War. The United States was fighting for the hearts and minds of these newly decolonized countries. And, yet, they were partly losing the war for the hearts and minds because of our domestic discrimination. So, today, you can say that we are revisiting some of these issues where the issues of racial injustice, the issues that Professor Brooks has just raised, the issues of voter suppression, the issues of mass incarceration, and a variety of other themes are apparent to the world, and we are being watched carefully and being judged by how we will handle this situation today. And I want to say it’s not as though the world sort of says, we want you to have the perfect republic, right. We begin—I’m speaking today from an article that I published recently with a colleague in Foreign Affairs called “Practice What You Preach: Global Human Rights Leadership Begins at Home.” It’s the article I wrote with my colleague John Shattuck, and we actually begin that piece saying that we both had memories. John Shattuck remembered a Russian dissident saying this to him, and I remember an Argentine human rights activist, and they both said they started to admire the U.S. more around Watergate. So they, in some ways, admired us more with this very failure in U.S. leadership but because the response of U.S. political leadership and judicial at the time was to take the necessary measures to hold Nixon accountable for his abuses of civil liberties. And so I think that’s the issue we’re facing today, too. The world is watching us. They’re not expecting us to be free of problems but they want to know how we’re going to grapple and address our problems, and chief among those is, of course, racial justice. And there’s no doubt that today federal civil rights law needs to be broadened and needs to be applied much more aggressively, and this is going to happen in a variety of areas, including housing policy, reform of the criminal justice system, and voting reform. So  Professor Brooks already made the point that  we have two million people imprisoned, make up—22 percent of the global prison population in the world are imprisoned in U.S. prisons, 60 percent of those are people of color. So I think our first goal really needs to be to reduce mass incarceration. That can be done in part through sentencing reform and particularly through sentencing reform around drug possession, for example. So these are issues that states are recognizing and starting to deal with and we have some more successful state policies that can serve as models. The disparate impact of the pandemic on racial minorities and other vulnerable populations has also revealed, I think, the cracks in our system to the world. And there, too, there are a series of reforms that need to happen and some of them are very practical such as increased federal support for after-school programs and for preschool programs, as well as more federal spending on low-income housing. That’s something, by the way, that was not in the infrastructure bill. OK. The original plan was to have it in the infrastructure bill and it was taken out. So there’s still—there’s work to be done immediately to address the issue of more public housing. Now, likewise, it’s hard to have credibility toward democracy abroad without voting reform at home. Biden and Pelosi have been stymied now, I think, three times by Republicans voting against the voting reform bill, and so that needs to be—as soon as these two big bills get out of the way the first issue has to be return to the voting reform bill. And there, again, we know the solutions. They’re being used in some states. We know how to increase voting. We know how not to suppress voting because we have these—we have states that have very high voter turnout and manage not to suppress their voters. So we know we need universal registration. We know we need enfranchisement of people with 5.2 million Americans with felony convictions that are disenfranchised even after serving their terms, and we know that much has to be done around purging of voter rolls where— (Telephone rings.) Sorry. We turned off everything but I couldn’t turn off my telephone. So this will all let us—and finally, we need to address, of course, partisan gerrymandering as well. This will let us speak with more credibility abroad, and the world is watching the next U.S. steps closely. We have, as I say, a moral and political obligation to address human rights here at home. But we also have—as we did after World War II, we also have national security concerns as we are engaged in geopolitical conflicts in the world with countries like Russia, or like China. Increasingly, those conflicts are going to turn not just on economics and not just on the military. Those conflicts are going to turn also on our values and what we stand for in the world, and that is the case that needs to be made by simultaneously addressing our domestic human rights issues as we try to promote and protect human rights in the world. Thank you. FASKIANOS: Thank you both. Reverend Brooks, do you want to add a few more words just about  what you think we can do to address this at home and— BROOKS: Sure. So I’d just add to my colleague’s, I think, encyclopedic discursive cataloguing of what needs to be done in this racial reckoning. I would add a couple of things. With respect to the criminal justice system, let’s go to the point at which people haven’t been convicted of anything. Bail reform, right. So, in other words, we have a system in this country where, literally, our poor people who may be charged with a parking ticket, with some minor offense, who find themselves, literally, in the bowels of the carceral state because they can’t come up with a couple hundred dollars, right, and this is—this represents thousands and thousands of people and this takes place on a daily basis. And so the point being here is when the United States criticizes China for mass incarcerating a substantial percentage of the population in terms of Uighurs, in terms of minorities, when we look at minorities in this country, people of color, not only mass incarcerated post-conviction but mass incarcerated before they’ve been convicted of anything. So I think that’s a critical point to take note of. It’s also important to take note of here that there needs to be not merely a comprehensiveness of the response but an urgency. So if we think about the distance between W.E.B. Du Bois’ petition in 1947 and 2021, the fact that we responded categorically to the same challenges in almost the same way—or, I should say, the same challenges speaks to the fact that there’s been both a lack of response and a lack of urgency with respect to the response. So as Kathryn lifted up the fact that we have a quarter of the world’s prisoners, we may—we cut—let’s know this. We cut the youth incarceration rate by 60 percent—60 percent—even as we stymied, have been stalemated with respect to the adults, and we’ve done so with respect to the children in the course of the last twenty years, particularly the last ten. The point being here is we can move quickly. We can move with a sense of urgency and impactfully and effectively. So when we speak to the world, it’s not merely saying the right words backed up by the right actions, but backed up with an appropriate timetable. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Now, let’s go to all of you for your questions and comments, and you can either raise—click on the raised hand icon and I will call on you or else you can write your question in the Q&A box. And if you do that, please also give us your affiliation so that I can read that as well. So I’m going to go first to Marina Buhler-Miko. Please unmute yourself and identify yourself. BUHLER-MIKO: Yes. I’m Marina Buhler Miko. I’m in Washington, D.C. I’m a member of St. Alban’s Church where I run our Global Missions Committee. I think the response of this government and, of course, the response of the Trump administration was even worse, to the Israel-Palestine situation is causing us problems with the young people and the older people in just all over the world, not recognizing the occupation, not recognizing Israel as an apartheid state, and doing nothing to try to alleviate any of that and going back to that old idea of two-state solution, which is never going to work since the settlements occupy so much of the West Bank. And  we’re considered hypocrites that we don’t even recognize it, that our media doesn’t recognize it. So that’s what I have to say. FASKIANOS: Kathryn, go ahead. SIKKINK: OK. I wasn’t sure if you wanted us just to begin or— FASKIANOS: Maybe just a comment. So if you don’t, we can go on, and thank you, Marina, for that intervention. Let’s go next to Ruth Messinger who has—oh, Kathryn, go ahead. SIKKINK: I’d be happy to comment. I was just waiting for you to direct the traffic. That’s all here. OK. So what I want to  underscore, I think, what’s the crux of Marina’s point and that is to the degree possible a coherent human rights policy needs to try to be even handed and not hypocritical, right. It needs to try to treat states with equal human rights problems equally, and the United States has failed to do that in the case of Israel. And we need to try to be coherent and consistent in our human rights policy, speak out against violations wherever they occur, including the violations that are happening in Israel. So thank you for that reminder. FASKIANOS: Thank you. BROOKS: I would just simply note that among young activists the way in which the United States responds to Israel and the rights of the Palestinians has caused challenges with respect to how young activists respond to other human rights challenges, and civil rights challenges domestically and abroad. So, in other words, this is not merely a matter of the credibility of the government. It’s also the credibility that we have among young people, right. So it’s a matter of diplomacy and morality and credibility in terms of the government. But on college campuses when you see students really going after one another, not merely after the government, it’s painful, and so it only underscores the degree to which the things that Professor Sikkink has lifted up are important, not just for the government but, literally, for young people. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go next to Ruth Messinger. MESSINGER: Hi. I just want to say—this is Ruth Messinger. I’m the former CEO and ongoing global ambassador for American Jewish World Service, and I do a lot of work on racial justice issues. I just want to say I’ve never heard a more succinct double presentation of this issue and I’m dealing with it all the time. So I want to thank the two of you. I want to urge Irina to figure out a way to actually get this recording out. It’s really spectacular. But what I want to ask you both is you—obviously, you suggested a long list of things that we need to remedy in this country to have any human rights standing again. I’m interested—I mean, for either of you, and Professor Sikkink, I haven’t read your paper but I will now, but how we get this message to our government. I don’t just mean by writing articles. I mean whether there are ways for people in academia and faith leaders, with whom I do a great deal of work, to find some access to the White House to say unless and until we—I want to say unless and until we are addressing some of these issues we won’t have standing and credibility again. But I think I’d even say a step before that and say unless we show some humility along the issues that Du Bois raised, that Frederick Douglass raised, that have been there for a long time, unless we pass H.R. 40, unless we really make clear that we’re concerned about these issues. And so I’m just wondering from either of your extensive networks, obviously, the Biden administration is really trying, as opposed to the Trump administration. But how do we get this message across about being honest, being humble, announcing some of our own issues? I think this was—I just want this last point—this was in evidence just now in Scotland. I mean, we went with some commitments and some urging, but we acted as if we had all the environmental issues in hand instead of saying  we haven’t conquered this yet, neither have you; let’s try to do it together. I know that’s not a common U.S. practice, but I think it’s what’s needed. And I’m wondering how you see getting people to think—to stop presenting ourselves as the ruling exception on all issues, doing better than anybody else. FASKIANOS: I think you both should answer that. So you decide who goes first. SIKKINK: Cornell, you want to—I started last time. BROOKS: Sure. Sure. I guess, as a practitioner and an advocate, I have some confidence that the case can be best made by literally the people on the frontlines of this work. What I mean by that is using international bodies, particularly international religious bodies, to really call for the kind of humility that I think you lifted up as a model of leadership. And here’s what I mean. So in other words, Professor Sikkink has lifted up the fact that we can use our faults and our failures as tragic opportunities for leadership. Meaning the degree to which we admit we have a problem, and we have a plan, and we have a strategy, and we have the commitment to respond, we win credibility, as a matter of leadership. So when you have young people and have religious bodies who are able to say to this administration and international fora: We have these challenges, but we have a history, to some measured degree, of surmounting at least some of them in ways that inspire confidence. So if we look at the election of President Barack Obama amid some voter suppression, right, the country—I should say, the globe was inspired by that election. And perhaps we imbibed a bit too much on hope and change, but it did lift our standing in the world. There are other examples. There are other ways in which and other moments in American history in which we’ve confronted challenges, been relatively honest in terms of activists, and literally inspired the globe. That’s what we have to model because, frankly, these politicians are not going to get the message on their own, right? We could literally dip them in the curricula at the Kennedy School and they will come out unwashed. This is a lesson that can only be taught by literally people who are literally risking themselves bodily in this work, right? So when you see all these young people who’ve been in the streets, who faced tear gas, who faced literally police officers with guns, and they have been a model for leadership. So we got to—we literally have to organize the message, structure the message, create fora for the messages. But Ruth, I think you were spot on. There are ways to do this. This is not unduly complicated. SIKKINK: So I very much agree with what Cornell just said. And I want to add, when we wrote—when I wrote this piece, we wrote it, of course, in January. And by the time it got published in March we had to change some of the things we said because some of the things we said needed to happen the Biden administration had already done, OK? So that’s interesting. And there are also things that are scheduled already that are going to happen that are very promising. The Biden administration is holding on December 9 and 10 the first of what apparently are going to be two summits for democracy. And I think that’s a powerful thing to do, to gather together democracies of the world and talk about how to promote democracy. So I think you’re right. When Biden first announced we are back at the head of the table, right, so wanting to reclaim this position at the head of the table. But I think with this summit of democracies there is this sense of, we need to be a coalition of democracies working with others. And then I’m going to raise something that I think is important for human rights, but I think is a controversial issue. So maybe some of the people will speak up. I just spoke yesterday about the situation in Afghanistan and the ending of the war in Afghanistan. And I do think that that—however poorly the exit was handled, that it was a necessary step as part of a move to enhance our credibility in the world with regard to human rights. And now what has to happen is now that the war in Afghanistan, in terms of our engagement in that war, is over, we now have to address things like closing Guantanamo, for example. There are still thirty-nine people in Guantanamo. There were forty when Biden came into office. He’s only released one. Thirty-nine people held twenty years without any—for the most part without any charges or convictions. So there’s a—it’s a mixture here of things that are happening that are on the right path, and things that are not yet happening and where people need to really continue to push in order to see change. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to a written question from Simran Jeet Singh, who’s the executive director for the Aspen Institute’s Inclusive America Project. He agrees with so much of what you’ve shared today and thanks you for sharing your time and expertise. So often foreign governments and leaders deflect legitimate human rights critiques coming from the U.S. by pointing to our shortcomings here—take care of your own home before you criticize others. It’s another way of approaching what you’ve discussed here. How would you respond to attempts to dismiss or negate such reactions? So I think we’ll go first to William, Cornell. BROOKS: Sure. Sure. It’s a variation on where I lifted up in response to the previous question, namely taking the ways in which we’re responding to our own challenges as models for—models, if you will, of our sincerity, diplomatically speaking, and intention, as opposed to necessarily models for others to mechanistically follow. So, for example, when deign to be critical of other countries in terms of their elections, in terms of the way they run their democracies, or the lack thereof, to point to the ways in which we have endeavored to right this democracy—in other words, the litigation that has resulted in some protections with respect to voting rights. Litigation being mounted not just with respect to race, but with—race and the Fourteenth Amendment, but generation with respect to the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, that is to say protecting the rights of young people, people with disabilities, speaking about the innovations in terms of voting, in terms of, same-day voting, automatic voting, the use of technology, early voting. So in other words, we have an incomplete picture, as in more to be done. But there are things that are being done. So pointing to the things that are being done, taking note of the things that are not being done, and messaging that we are in fact all in this together. In the same way that our fates are joined and yoked with respect to the climate, with respect to democracy our fates are also yoked and joined. So we can’t be dishonest about what we’re not doing, but we can be honest about what we are doing. And there’s a tremendous amount of innovation with respect to young activists, advocates around the country, experiments in democracy that are worthy of note and that we should use as inspiration and for emulation. SIKKINK: So this is why our article basically says we need to do both of these simultaneously. We can’t just check out from the world leadership for the many years it would take to get our own house in order, right? Because, one, our allies don’t want us to do that, it’s not good for the world for the United States to go into isolationism. So we have to do both simultaneously. And we are starting to do that. The United States had withdrawn from the Human Rights Council, has now run again, and has been re-elected to the Human Rights Council. It’s an imperfect institution, but it’s a better institution with the United States in it than with the United States out of it, despite all of our—as we talked about—all of the flaws we have in our own system. And so I just think that’s the fine line that we have to walk. And a number of the countries who say who are you to talk about human rights are—that’s a rhetorical strategy, in fact. And many of our—I think our genuine allies in the campaigns for democracy and human rights in the world have welcomed the United States to come back and to be part of this struggle. But I completely agree with what Cornell just said about the importance of doing so with humility and not with hubris. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go next to a raised hand from Syed Sayeed. SAYEED: Good afternoon. And once again, I thank the Council on Foreign Relations, and Irina, and both speakers for their outstanding contribution to the issue. I just wanted to bring out one aspect of this entire national issue and international issue about human rights abuses and all of that. I think in the present situation what we need is to highlight the roles that were played by historical people, like Martin Luther King or Gandhi, and people from Africa. There are remarkable individuals who have played an extremely significant and historically, changing conditions. So I think what we really need at this point in all communities in all nations, that we focus on a positive approach to doing things in the worst of situations, without engaging in argumentation and battles, and things like that. So those role models I think need to be highlighted. And what they did in the worst of circumstances needs to be analyzed in a way that our younger generation can see the potential that’s there for them to sort of take inspiration from there and do something in the world without waiting for recognition or anything to change circumstances within their communities, within their neighborhoods, and of course, nationally and internationally. Thank you. SIKKINK: Cornell. BROOKS: Yeah. So I’m really fascinated by this question because with the essential advent of digital activism, right, so the proliferation of all these platforms in terms of YouTube, and Instagram, and Facebook, and Twitter, and TikTok, you have this generation of young people who can literally hold bits of history at a moment’s notice, and in essentially social media nanoseconds. One of the things I teach at the Kennedy School is something that religious people do, which is to say they have a hermeneutic of history, right? So religious people will—Christians will talk about heilsgeschichte, salvation history. Well, in terms of social justice, the ways in which we can use history, we can look at figures like Martin Luther King, and Howard Thurman, and Gandhi, and Thoreau, but also people close at hand, people in our communities, and tell those stories, use those histories in ways that create a sense of agency, a sense of resilience. So in this moment, to your point, Syed, I think it’s important for us to literally invest in the cultivation, the interpretation, the understanding of history in ways that not merely inform us at a distance—an analytic distance, but also inform and inspire us, right? This is really, really important in this moment because some of the biggest culture wars in our societies have everything to do with is history being instrumentalized or is it being weaponized, right? In other words, is the 1619 Project about empowerment or is it about power over someone else in ways that are debilitating? What I want to emphasize that’s really, really important is we have an opportunity to really use history to bring generations together and empower generations. That requires investment, it requires bridging sometimes a false chasm, dichotomy between the academy, activism, and advocates in the streets, and the distance between generations. So your question is a powerful one. It’s a powerful one in terms of the answer. The answer to that question has to do with not merely what we tell young people, but what we show, and what we invest in, and what we open ourselves to. FASKIANOS: Kathryn. SIKKINK: I was going to say, I can’t imagine a better answer than what Cornell just gave. I just want to say, as a postscript, one of the things I’ve been trying to do is look at the history of human rights—global human rights. Because there’s sometimes the misunderstanding of people who say, oh, human rights just comes from the Global North, from the United States and Western Europe, and they’ve just imposed that inappropriate model on countries that are no—have no culture interest in human rights. I mean, people—you hear this from people from the Global South saying that’s all cultural imposition. And one of the things you do if you look at the history of human rights, is you find there are far more diverse origins to global human rights advocacy and to global human rights law than are captured by that model. But somehow people have been forgotten. So I’ve done work where I’ve tried to capture a number of Latin American leaders who contributed to the human rights language in the U.N. Charter, for example, that wouldn’t be there if it had not been for their actions. Including important women leaders about women’s rights issues. Women leaders from India. Madam Pandit, who was Nehru’s sister, and who was the first woman to preside over the U.N. General Assembly, was a powerful voice for women’s rights and for the rights of decolonization. And so—and it goes on and on. So I think it’s important to rediscover some of these histories and lift up these diverse figures who can be role models. FASKIANOS: Thank you. We’re going to go next to Reverend Dr. George Gatgounis. OPERATOR: (Gives queuing instructions.) We’ll now go to the reverend. FASKIANOS: And please unmute yourself. We’re still—you’re still muted, and I don’t think—Audrey, I don’t think we can unmute from our side. Can we? OPERATOR: No. We’ve sent the prompt, if you’re able to click it. FASKIANOS: OK. So maybe you could type your question or comment in the Q&A box. And if there are other questions, please. So I see in the chat that Holly Atkinson has asked about women’s rights, particular the attack on women’s reproductive rights. Dr. Atkinson with the CUNY School of Medicine. And, Kathryn, did you say one of the early policies of the Biden administration was to suspend the global gag rule that the Trump administration had imposed. And just to pick up on this, you said that the—you had to revise your article because the Biden administration did a few things that you had already recommended and had more on the way. What are the things—and this is to both of you, maybe we can start to Kathryn—that they need to do next in your view? SIKKINK: OK. Well, I mentioned that they had suspended the global gag rule. We’d also recommended that they do more to cooperate with the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The Trump administration, again, had pulled funding from those institutions, accusing them, I think falsely, of being—of working in favor of women’s reproductive rights, OK? Working—put it this way, of being pro-abortion. And so the—one of the issues that we wanted to focus on was that the Biden administration has taken some things—promotion of LGBTQ rights internationally, for example, there have been some initiatives. But there are some glaring issues still. And if I may—if I may just—one of the glaring issues is around any accountability for U.S. past torture policies. I’ve just—just last week there was a state secret case before the U.S. Supreme Court. And it was a case of U.S. v. Zubaydah. Zubaydah was one of the people accused of being an al-Qaida high-level person. He was not. He was taken to many black sites. He was viciously tortured, including he was water boarded eighty times. And he’s been held in Guantanamo without charge for many, many years. And the—it’s a complicated story—but the Polish government wanted to have testimony from the psychologists Mitchell and Jessen, who had devised the CIA torture policy and who supervised the torture of this individual, Abu Zubaydah. And the Biden administration followed the Trump administration in trying to say this was a state secret. They would not allow these guys to testify because it was a state secret. And I was one of the people who did a—who helped organize an amicus brief in that case. And one of the things we said is: This is not a state secret. This is—everyone knows this. We recently had—in the military commissions we’ve had a guy give testimony about his torture. Mitchell and Jessen wrote a book about their experience. I mean, this is the best well-known state secret. And the Supreme Court justice asked very skeptical questions about the Biden administration decision to try to pretend this was still a state secret. So there’s some blind spots, and accountability for past torture is one of them.  FASKIANOS: Cornell. BROOKS: There’s a saying among lawyers, asked and answered. The question was asked and brilliantly answered. So I don’t have anything else to add on that point. FASKIANOS: OK. So I’m going to try—let’s try to go again to Dr. Gatgounis and see if he can unmute himself. And it does not look like that is happening. Too bad. OK. (Laughs.) So we will move on. So, again, if other people have questions. I mean, as Ruth said, you have covered so much succinctly that it’s—I think you’ve stymied the group. But there must be—we have time for a couple more questions. So I encourage you—somebody to raise their hand. Or I will just call on people, if I know the group. (Laughter.) So I can be what I’ve always wanted to be, a professor, and call out. And, oh, Tom Walsh has raised his hand. Thank you, Tom. (Laughs.) WALSH: OK, hi. Can you hear me, OK? FASKIANOS: We can. Thank you. WALSH: Yeah. Thank you, Irina. Thank you to these two excellent presenters. And a great conversation/discussion. I hope this is not some—I arrived a little late, so if you covered this just move on. But I started thinking about the meaning of justice itself. And we’re dealing with the category of justice called social justice. And justice is—when you unpack it, as both of you know, all of you know, it’s extremely complex. We can talk about economic justice, criminal justice, political justice. People like John Rawls would write volumes about political justice alone. And we have social justice. And I guess my simple point is that we use general categories and concepts, but they are themselves multiplicities. And that’s why there’s often disagreement. Or we seem to kind of cut the difficult conversation short by associating a particular form of—like, economic justice obviously means X, Y, and Z. Whereas, it might also be possible for a person to see it as meaning A, B, and C. So again, it’s kind of a question about justice and why we have these intractable arguments, in some ways because maybe we don’t define the terms as carefully as we should. For what it’s worth, that’s my thought for the day. And thank you again for this great discussion—and important discussion. FASKIANOS: Cornell, do you want to start? Oh, Kathryn, you are muted. You both are muted. OK, something happened. Sorry about that little technical glitch. That was a little interesting, but here we are. We got— SIKKINK: Here we are! FASKIANOS: The wonders of Zoom. BROOKS: And the question went to essentially definitions of justice. SIKKINK: Mmm hmm. FASKIANOS: Yes. So— SIKKINK: I was going to say, I teach a course next semester called “International Law and Global Justice.’ And one of the first things we do is we grapple exactly with these different meanings of justice. And there’s a problem, which is justice means so many things that you might think it means—it means too many things. But I tried to separate them into three major categories of justice. Justice as accountability, justice as fairness—and that’s sort of the Rawls tradition that you mention—and then justice as equality. And show how people exactly the way Thomas Walsh just said, people coming from one tradition of justice, justice as fairness, might arrive at a very different understanding of the just out come than somebody coming at it with the justice as equality. So, yes, your point is very well taken. BROOKS: If I could—if I could just maybe take a step back from the question. Many of these questions of justice are presented not philosophically but bodily, right? So meaning the racial reckoning that George Floyd’s murder precipitated or hastened had everything to do with the fact that we were confronted with literally a body. And if you look at the way in which the high commissioner’s report responded, by looking at that murder in the context of globalized, colonialized racial violence, noting where—it’s place in history, policing, housing, disparities with respect to education. The reason I’m taking note of this is because certainly there are many philosophical approaches. But what I have found over the course of the twenty-five-plus years of doing this work as a litigator, as a minister, is there are times in which we are literally presented with an urgent question in the form of a body. In the context of social media, the question is posed in terms of a human being reduced to a hashtag. The point I’m trying to make here is our response can be multifaceted and our response can be multidisciplinary. But at the end of the day, when we look at these very concrete challenges, the—how do you say—philosophical limitations need not impede our legal and policy responses with a sense of urgency, right, and a sense of moral imagination. And what that means is, look at certainly the human rights report, but any of the reports of the major civil rights organizations. Many of the best media treatments of, say, the issues unleashed in terms of George Floyd’s murder speak to a need for a multivalent response, a multidisciplinary response, a multisystem response. The point I want to just lift up here is if you note the distinctions drawn by older people and by younger people. Younger people say, we got to respond to these problems in this way, this way, this way. And they see no need, right, for any—as Martin Luther King put it—any paralysis for analysis. They see no need to essentially have to figure out the categories before acting decisively. And the reason I want to note this is because literally the question is so often presented not philosophically. As somebody trained in systematic theology and social ethics, but who’s literally arrived at the doorstep of some of these tragedies, sometimes, we don’t get to wait. We have to move. We have to act. We have to behave in ways that are morally decisive. I just wanted to note that, rather parenthetically. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Jim Gilchrist. GILCHRIST: HI. Jim Gilchrist. Carnegie Mellon University. Thank you both. Reinhold Niebuhr famously pointed out that people tend to act less morally in collectives than they do individually. People will do things together that they would not do by themselves. And he wrote a lot about how nationalism is, among other things, a sort of collective egoism. So my question is when you’ve talked about humility, and I fully agree that would be a great thing, can you point to instances of great nations acting with humility? And what would a politically feasible humility look like in 2021 or 2022 for the United States? It’s a little hard to picture what sort of national humility, for example, the president of the United States might offer, that would be politically acceptable. FASKIANOS: Kathryn, do you want to start? SIKKINK: Well, for example, this is just a small thing, but I think that Biden could have gotten away with not saying we’re back at the head of the table. I think he could have gotten away—I don’t think people were parsing his statements so much. He could have said, we’re back at the table. We’re back with our allies. We’re part of this struggle, instead of insisting on reclaiming a leadership role that people were a bit skeptical about given—people fear. What they fear is that you’re back at the table, and then you’re gone from the table again four years later. And so there is this distrust. Our allies want us back at the table, they want us working for human rights, but they’re worried. And so I think at least slight—a slight recognition that there might be some worry about what next wouldn’t be politically damaging nationally, which is kind of what you’re saying, right? I mean, James, are you saying that great powers can’t—it would be too damaging for a leader to say—to express any humility? GILCHRIST: I’m not saying it would be too damaging, I’m just saying that it’s a rare phenomenon. And what would it look like for a leader of this country to exhibit the sort of humility that you’re calling for? And again, I agree with that. I think that’d be a wonderful model. But anytime anybody suggests that the United States is anything less than exemplary in its virtue, there tends to be a massive pushback. So Obama got in trouble for suggesting some of that. So I’m just curious, can you point to examples where a great power has acted with a kind of humility that has inspired other nations? And then what would that look like here and now? BROOKS: Hmm. I’m not sure I can give you an example of a nation that’s inspired other nations in terms of an act of humility. What I could imagine is if you look at the response to the Chauvin conviction, namely there was a commendation of the prosecutors, the jury for their work, and this outcome, in terms of holding one police officer accountable for a horrific crime captured on video. The response to that I think, by President Biden and others, was: This does not solve the problem, but it is the right response to the problem. The challenge became that the humility was never leveraged, right? Meaning that we never went from having done this, we can yet do this. Had the president said, I’m willing to use—I’m willing to amend or create an exception for the filibuster to get the George Floyd Act through Congress, I’m willing to acknowledge the flaws, the mistakes, the challenges of this democracy with respect to policing and the carceral state, but we can take this step. The point is not merely to be humble, but to act decisively and to leverage humility in ways that inspire people. It’s the absence of the latter that causes a lack of appreciation for the former. FASKIANOS: Thank you both. There’s another question in the chat but, unfortunately, we are out of time, and we will just have to take up clean environments and rights of water on another call. So we’ll have to dedicate a whole conversation to that important topic. So, Cornell and Kathryn, thank you very much for being with us. This is a really wonderful way to spend this hour with you. We really appreciate your taking time from your busy schedules and all the work that you have done. I encourage you all, if you’re not already following Cornell’s work on Twitter at @cornellwbrooks and Kathryn’s work at @kathryn_sikkink. So please do follow them there. We will send out the link to this video and the transcript, as well as a link to Kathryn’s article, and anything else, Cornell, that you would like us to include that you think would further deepen the understanding of these important issues. And, again, please follow us on our Religion and Foreign Policy Program on Twitter at @CFR_Religion. And as always, we encourage you to send us emails of your suggestions for topics, and speakers, and other ways that we can help with the important work that you’re doing in your communities. Email us at [email protected]. So thank you all again, and thank you both. We really appreciate it. BROOKS: Thank you. SIKKINK: Our pleasure. My pleasure. It was great. FASKIANOS: Take care. BROOKS: Thank you.

Our panelists examine religious freedom in the Middle East, how international organizations and the United States have responded to the persecution of religious minorities in the past, and what can be done in the present.

Marc Gopin, director of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution and James H. Laue professor at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, and Zaha Hassan, fellow in the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, discuss human rights issues and approaches to peacebuilding in Israel and Palestine. Steven A. Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at CFR, moderates. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program. COOK: Well, thank you very much. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar Series. I’m Steven Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa studies here at CFR. As a reminder, the webinar is on the record. The audio, video, and transcript will be made available on CFR’s website and on our iTunes podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Now on to the business of the morning. We’re delighted to have Marc Gopin and Zaha Hassan with us. We shared their bios with you, but I’ll just give you a few highlights before we begin. Marc Gopin is the director of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution, and the James H. Laue Professor at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. He’s written a ton. He’s done a lot. He has six books. And he has a Ph.D. in ethics from Brandeis University, and was ordained as a rabbi at Yeshiva University, which means I’m going to have to behave extra nice during this. Zaha Hassan is a human rights lawyer and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Previously, Zaha was the coordinator and senior legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team during Palestine’s bid for U.N. membership, and was a member of the Palestinian delegation to Quartet-sponsored exploratory talks—that’s my New York accent—Quartet-sponsored exploratory talks between 2011 and 2012. Welcome to you both, Marc and Zaha. I have been really looking forward to this conversation. Let me start with you, Zaha. The two of us participated in a Foreign Affairs-sponsored event, so to speak, in which the magazine posed the following statement to a group of experts asking them whether they strongly disagreed, disagreed, were neutral, agreed, or strongly agreed. And here’s the statement: “The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no longer viable.” Now, you wrote you strongly agreed with a confidence level of ten. I also strongly agreed, but with a confidence level of eight. When I was thinking about that, I was wondering what the difference was between eight and ten and why I said eight rather than ten. But nevertheless, we’re basically in the same place on that. But I just want to share with the group a little bit of what you wrote along with your number strongly agreeing with the proposition that the two-state solution is no longer viable. OK, here we go. Hold on, everybody: “There is no political constituency in Israel to support either meaningful Palestinian sovereignty in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, or enfranchisement in the state of Israel. Most Israelis are fine with the continuation of the status quo or formal annexation of the occupied territories. Israel’s Jewishness is valued more than democratic governance and equal rights. U.S. policy, which has operated to guarantee that Israel would be shielded from the consequences of its actions that violate international law, has facilitated the current sense of impunity among Israeli officials. There is no sign that U.S. policy will change appreciably in the next four years. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has now morphed into a struggle for freedom and equal rights for all living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.” Now, here’s my question: If Israelis value Israel’s Jewishness more than democratic governance and equal rights, and Palestinians question or reject the Jewish connection to the land, how does the struggle for freedom and equal rights for all living between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River play out? How do we get to what everybody thinks would be coexistence, whether it’s—I agree with you. I think that there’s no two-state solution. But whether you conceive of a two-state solution or not, or a one-state reality, how do we get to that point of coexistence if Israelis believe that Jewishness is more important than democracy and Palestinians don’t even necessarily recognize the Jewish connection to the land? So how does this happen? HASSAN: Yeah. I mean, I would  question that premise that Palestinians don’t accept Jewish—the Jewish connection to the land. I don’t think that’s accurate. I think what they object to is their displacement and their dispossession on the land, or that their rights are somehow subservient to Jewish rights to the land. And so I—if you think about Palestinian support over time for a two-state solution, you see that that support has always been a bit different than the conceptualization of what Israeli support for a two-state solution has been. There has never been, really, a meeting of the minds on what exactly that means. For Palestinians, a two-state solution meant a sovereign Palestinian state, but that didn’t negate the Palestinian citizens’ rights inside of Israel to equality nor did it negate the refugees’ right to choose to return to what became the state of Israel and to reparations for their refugee-hood. That’s what a two-state solution means to Palestinians. To Israelis, a two-state solution was a way to maintain Israel as a Jewish-majority state and to prevent the overtaking of Israel as a binational state. And that was viewed as somehow making Israel less secure. If there was a binational state, it would defeat the whole purpose of the creation of the state of Israel. And so that meant that refugees would not be able to return. It meant that Palestinian citizens couldn’t enjoy equality because there was always going to have to be an artificial way to maintain a Jewish majority so the Palestinian citizens of Israel could not overtake their Jewish neighbors in terms of the demographic makeup of Israel. And so the idea that there was ever a two-state solution on the table that both sides could agree to I don’t think was ever there. And so now what we’re left with is this idea that, why not—why not one state where Jews and Palestinian Muslims and Christians can live together, can share the entirety of the land, and do so with equal rights and equal dignity? Today, what we see is we have equal numbers of Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as Jews, and—but all of them are living under the jurisdiction of Israel, whether they’ve living under occupation or they’re living as citizens of Israel, or whether they’re living in East Jerusalem in some kind of  status that is— COOK: Weird administrative status. HASSAN: (Laughs.) Yeah, some status in between. So the reality is we have one state. And the question then becomes, what kind of state should it be? Should it be one state where this domination of Palestinians continues and the repression continues, where Palestinian dispossession/displacement/evictions continue, or should it be a place where people can live together under protection of law? And I don’t know why we think that—(laughs)—this can’t be the case in Israel just like it’s the case in the United States, where you have a pluralistic society that enjoys  same equality before the law. Of course, it looks farfetched today because there’s been so much done in the last  twenty-plus years to embolden the Israeli right and to empower it and to make it think that there isn’t going to be any repercussions for their actions on the ground—the settlement expansion, the displacement of Palestinians. So, of course, that segment of the Israeli electorate feels empowered, feels emboldened, and doesn’t want to compromise. Why should it? But that can change if over time you see a U.S. policy that changes, if the international community starts to hold Israel to account for its action, over time you will start to see a shift in the way Israelis think about themselves, and think about their country, and what they want for their country. I think international opprobrium does matter to Israel. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t see such a push towards Arab normalization and Muslim normalization of Israel. That’s very important to Israel. And if it’s allowed to think that this state of domination of Palestinian lives is normal, then it’s going to continue. And so that’s why I am not pessimistic that things can change; I am optimistic that things can change. I have had friends—(laughs)—who told me that they thought Apartheid-era South Africa would never change absent violent confrontation, and then one day it ended. And I think, similarly, things can change and attitudes can change in Israel-Palestine. But I don’t think   it’s something endemic to Palestinians that they could never conceive of themselves living with Israelis. Palestinians work in Israel. Palestinians are citizens of Israel. There’s a lot of experience with living with Israeli Jews in daily life, interacting in daily life. It’s not like they don’t have experience with that. What they don’t want the experience of is one of domination, and so that’s what needs to change. COOK: As with so much when it comes to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, the end is easier to conceive than how to actually get there. I have a follow up, but let me  get to Marc. Marc, ever since I was a 23-year-old research associate and sat outside the office of a guy named Douglas Johnston, who I think you know, when he was the executive vice president of a think tank called the Center for Strategic and International Studies, I’ve been hearing that religion is the missing component of peacemaking in statecraft. You’ve been deeply involved in these efforts for many years, but for all the talk about religion and coexistence—and I don’t mean the kind of day-to-day interaction that Zaha was just talking about. Anybody who’s been to Israel and Palestine understands that at that kind of daily interaction level Israelis and Palestinians interact because they have to. There’s no way to actually separate from each other. But it’s—for all of the work that’s been put into the idea of religion as a component of peacemaking and statecraft, there hasn’t been much headway toward resolving the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians on this score. Palestinians are no closer to a state than they’ve been before. In fact, one can make the argument that they’re further away from their own state. Israel’s occupation and annexation of territory continues. Politically, neither the Israeli government nor the Palestinian leadership are making the moves—are capable to make the moves required for peace even if they wanted to because of the configuration of their domestic politics. So why should we expect religion and whatever commonalities there may be between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—why do we expect that to fill the gap? And why do we expect that politics won’t undo that, as politics is often the problem that complicates things? So convince me that this is more than just talk shop. GOPIN: Right. So these are excellent, excellent points. And I agree with so much of what Zaha said in her analysis and appreciate your thoughts. And here’s the thing, there are constructs here that we have to look at from a scientific point of view. From a scientific point of view, you have to look broadly and historically as well. And that is that in history there were times when it was inconceivable to think of French-German reconciliation. It was inconceivable to think of the end of a thousand-year war. It was inconceivable for Protestants and Catholics to coexist. And over time, in fact, the whole—the very secular notion of separation of church and state evolved out of religious people who developed that notion, and then it became a thing. Then it became a reality. In other words, right now—in the last forty, fifty years—we have been working with almost no funds whatsoever on stopping violence between Israelis and Palestinians behind the scenes with religious advisors and influencers on government on both sides. In that process of the work that’s the—the clear works of imams and rabbis that have stopped various forms of violence, and are also building more education on all sides for human rights and religion as something that can coexist. There has been a steady process of very conservative Muslim and Jewish rabbis—Muslims imams and Jewish rabbis who are more and more in consensus on human rights and on women’s rights than ever before as a unit. And there is the work of Rabbi Melchior and Rabbi Danny Roth, and before him the more radical work that I did with Rabbi Froman at the time in order to subvert the processes of violence. The fact is that we don’t know scientifically what it would be like if we had the same income for religious coexistence that we have for violent confrontation. There’s never been an experiment in putting together the amount of resources for diplomacy, millions and millions of dollars, that would go into religious coexistence and beef up a process that was not only rabbis and imams, not only women on all sides, but something that would go deep into messaging the entire civilization. Because Judaism and Christianity and Islam are instrumentalized by politicians, and violently instrumentalized, around the world. This is a method of control and of power, because there’s a vacuum of diplomacy considering the assets that could be in—could be for the processes of peacebuilding if diplomacy saw religious leadership and religious masses as a potential ally in the processes of building equality and coexistence. So there are a number of rabbis and imams that get this and already are working tirelessly on this, but they’re completely unfunded. And, honestly, the progressives in Israel and Palestine consider those folks to be a threat. They assume that religion means less women’s rights, for example. They assume it means less secular rights. However, this is a process of negotiation on both sides that needs to take place in order to create a common constituency of religious identity and human rights that would then move towards aneither one-state; or confederation; or a move towards majority-Palestinian in one part, majority-Jewish in the other, with equal rights in both. We could do that, but right now religion is mostly purely instrumentalized for violence. It’s purely instrumentalized for resistance. You can call it violence. You can call it terrorism. You can call it—call it fascism. Whatever names you want to call the instrumentalization of religion, it’s horrific around the world but it’s because it’s well-funded. And the peacebuilding is completely zero-funded by comparison. Afghanistan: a trillion dollars for war, zero dollars for building Islam and peacebuilding, and we lost it. Some of us tried very hard in Afghanistan. Again, it was a pittance. So, from a scientific point of view, you really can’t judge it unless you look at the relative investments in both efforts. COOK: I do want to get—thank you, Marc. I do want to get to questions from participants in the webinar, but I do want to follow up because, Marc, you raised an issue that I think is important to explore a bit with both you and Zaha. There seems to be—let’s take at face value the desire among some rabbis and some imams and others for peaceful coexistence, but there seems to be two very significant problems here. The first is—Marc, you referred to it—extremism, and you do have extremism on both sides in the name of religion. Hamas does not—sees all of Israel and Palestine as Muslim lands, and thus the illegitimacy of Israel and Jewish claims to those lands. What do these imams who are interacting with these other—how do they overcome that? I recognize that there’s a money problem, but money doesn’t solve everything. These are ideas. These are powerful ideas. And then—so that’s the question, is what do you do about something like Hamas? Or, Marc, you mentioned in an email to me that you’ve worked with settler rabbis. How do rabbis, how do they overcome the powerful ideas? These are maximalists. These are Jewish supremacists in the West Bank who, sure, they may say, hmm, we can have Palestinians in our midst, but it’s sort of a reversed dhimmitude. Sure, they can have some rights, but we control this land because this is Jewish patrimony. How do we overcome both of those things in order to get to a place of peaceful coexistence? It seems to me this is extremely, extremely difficult to do, given the political power of actually both. GOPIN: So just as Christian democracy emerged in Europe and the Christian democratic parties became the locus for a different hermeneutic, a different interpretation of Christianity that came to dominate; and just as Indonesians have allowed for Islamic democracy parties to be the largest parties in the country that now dominate; so, too, we are working very hard on Islamic interpretations and Jewish interpretations that allow for coexistence and human rights and equality. And in fact, I’ve spoken to—I mean, the settler rabbi that I worked with—only one, Rabbi Froman—Rabbi Froman was at the forefront of reaching out to Hamas and working with Sheikh Yassin at a time when it was absolutely verboten and impossible for Israelis to do so. He tried desperately to prevent the assassination, ultimately, of Sheikh Yassin, not because he agreed with their methods but because he was absolutely convinced that on a religious and human level it was possible to achieve a sharing of values that would end the war and allow for the building of apology, repentance, and coexistence. As far as the notion, the maximalist notion of Eretz HaKodesh, of Holy Land for Jewish conquest; or for Waqf, for Islamic conquest, the fact is that for centuries and centuries these notions have been subject to interpretation. And that’s why it’s so dangerous when politicians use authority. And we know from obedience studies that the power of authorities to distort in one direction or another—we’ve seen this in the United States now—is massive, from the obedience studies of psychosocial effects of leaders. So our argument is that if the leaderships—and we have a lot of intelligence agency folks and military folks that have come to agree with precisely our position, that our big missing ingredient was understanding Islam, was welcoming Muslims. This is from all—many senior generals in Israel. This is something that has happened in history but not yet here, in some ways because of the stubbornness of the diplomatic class of not believing it’s possible. Our argument is that if managed with a man like Yasser Arafat, very tough—very tough customer—to agree to a religious peace treaty, but at the time is the Americans and the Israeli leadership that would not accept the idea of a parallel religious treaty process, but Arafat did, that was interesting to us. We knew what he was doing. We knew the violence he was perpetrating. But we also knew that with a vision, a common vision of the holiness of Jerusalem, for example, there was a way forward. And that way is continuing among forward-thinking people in the religious circles. But if everyone in the world says, no, religion is just for violence, then that’s what it becomes. If the only place to resist occupation is religion, people become religious. So if we create an alternative, then we’re influencing the way in which religion is going to be interpreted by millions of people. COOK: Zaha, I wanted to give you equal time on that as well. HASSAN: Yeah. I just want to amplify what Marc was saying about how religious interpretation can change. I think we would all agree that U.S. policy plays a huge part in the dynamics that take place in Israel-Palestine. And we’ve seen especially in the last administration, that the passionate evangelical wing of the Republican Party really had a lot of influence on the Trump administration and their thinking about how to relate to Israelis and Palestinians. And what we’re noticing now among the younger generation of Evangelicals is sort of a different way of understanding the conflict. And in the last few years, we’ve seen support among younger Evangelicals really drop for sort of the interpretations of their elders with respect to the conflict. So I do think that people’s understandings, people’s interpretations are—can change. They change all the time. Not just in Israel-Palestine, but even in the U.S. So we shouldn’t plan our foreign policy with the understanding that things are all—people’s viewpoints are going to be stagnant, or  people’s understanding of their faith is going to be stagnant. Things evolve all the time, and it depends a lot on the way we conduct ourselves and our foreign policy as well. COOK: OK. I think we are ready to for Q&A from participants in the webinar. So I’m going to ask the folks in the background to remind people who to ask a question. And then we’ll go forward. OPERATOR: (Gives queuing instructions.) Dr. Cook, back over to you. COOK: Thank you. It’s like the voice of God telling us how to ask a question, so appropriate for this. The first person in the queue is David Michaels. MICHAELS: Hi. can you hear me? COOK: Yes, we can. Go ahead, David. MICHAELS: Great. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for this conversation and for all of your contributions. I’m David Michaels, director of UN and intercommunal affairs at B’nai B’rith International. I wanted to question and perhaps push back a bit at Zaha Hassan’s assertion that Palestinians broadly speaking do accept the legitimacy of Jewish history and presence on the land. I think many who closely monitor Palestinian political discourse, media content, educational programing, and public polling would, in fact, report extraordinary denial of Jewish and Israeli legitimacy on the land. And I think that that denial can be attributed to a number of factors. So I’d ask, beyond incitement also by the leaders of Fatah, does she know, or do you, Dr. Hassan, do you not recognize the ideology and, in fact, the strength of major groups, including Hamas, as Dr. Cook mentioned, which openly and doctrinally demand Israel’s violent destruction? HASSAN: No, I— COOK: Zaha, the floor is yours. HASSAN: Yes. No, I don’t—I don’t deny that Hamas  has violent—(laughs)—feelings about the state of Israel as it exists today, for sure, and that it denies  the legitimacy of the state of Israel as it exists today. But likewise, as Marc was saying, there’s a lot of room for change within Hamas. And we’ve seen a lot of change with Hamas over the years. A lot of Hamas officials now have talked about the two-state solution, as a—at least as a temporary matter, a long-term temporary solution. And there is a lot of change taking place in terms of how Hamas is rebranding itself. And we saw that in the last couple of years in terms of its changes to its covenant and public statements that it’s been making. So I don’t think that—again, these positions that various religious factions have taken, I don’t think they’re stagnant. I think they can change. A lot of Hamas’s problems with the Palestinian authority and the peace—the Oslo peace process was the way in which it didn’t address important issues to Palestinians. The core issue, which is Palestinian displacement from 1948, and the refugee issue. Those are legitimate grievances that all Palestinians want to see rectified. And so it’s not just a Hamas issue. It’s a Palestinian issue. So I think—and, again Hamas has—Hamas is sort of coming around to the idea of a two-state solution. Is it negating that? They’re calling for the same things that much of the Palestinian population is calling for, which is meaningful choice for return and reparations for refugees. So, yeah, I didn’t—I don’t mean to say that  Hamas is not opposed to the state of Israel when I was making my comments about Palestinians and how they feel about Jewish claims to—and Jewish history in Israel-Palestine. It was to say that it’s not about in history, claims of Jews to Palestine. It’s about whether Palestinians have a place in between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea at the same time. COOK: OK. Great. Thank you. Riki, can you see if there are any questions in the—written questions in the chat, please? OPERATOR: We’ll take a written question from Chelsea Garbell, associate director of global spiritual life at New York University. She asks: Why must religion be something that is instrumentalized? Religion is like any other aspect of the social and works on, and is impacted by, politics and culture in turn. The assumption of instrumentalization implies that religion isn’t an independent actor in its own right and a player in this conversation. COOK: Who wants to take that? I suspect that that may actually be a question more appropriate to me, but I’ll leave it to the panelists. (Laughter.) GOPIN: Well, I just—I wasn’t saying what should be. I was talking about what is. And the reality is that organized religion has always been instrumentalized, and it is around the world, sometimes for the good and sometimes for very destructive purposes. These are—many religions are state-based religions. They fall in line with whatever the leaders, democratic or nondemocratic, want them to say and do, and affirm. And these are realities that we have to live with. Sometimes it’s beneficial. If there were a serious reformation and transformation of the Jewish-Palestinian relationship, we already have evidence that across the Gulf they would be—the states would be more than ready to have the muftis and others  pronounce an embrace of the Jewish-Palestinian peace treaties, et cetera. So and yet in Iran it would be a separate problem because of the military and political relationship between Iran and the Arab Gulf, and with Israel. And that’s—so that’s a separate—it’s very, very secular when it comes to organized religion. And that’s an opportunity if smart diplomats and smart democrats are serious about moving the world in a better direction. And I—David’s concern about Hamas’s charter is absolutely on target. These are very risky things. But they’re very risky for Palestinians too, to lose everything that they’ve never had and loved in terms of their country and of their background. So it’s a high risk for everyone, but I’m arguing that with shifting you put pressure on the extreme wing of any religion party. The more accommodating, the more that we had a serious plan for majority-minority relationships in Palestinian areas, and majority-minority relationships in the more—in the Jewish majority areas, if that plan was more serious you would see a withering away of some of the rejectionist arguments that are so current in certain sections of Ikhwān, or Muslim Brotherhood, around the world. And we’ve already seen evidence of that. The very Islamist leaders in Israel who were doing peacebuilding, they’re Ikhwān too. They have a Muslim Brotherhood approach. But their approach is evolving based on relationships and based on what they feel is possible. And I believe that we wouldn’t have a new government. We would still be under Netanyahu if it weren’t for the evolution of Islamist thinking in portions of Israel, that decided to join the government. I’m not saying that that solved the issue. I think we still need serious conversations among Jews about reparations and about—and about apologies, and about some people coming back. And I think that the Islamic community needs some serious conversations about truly sending signals for the Jewish right to exist as a majority state in their portion. And the more we do that, the more I think that we could see evolution. But we need the secular global leadership to embrace this approach. COOK: Zaha, you want to get in on this? I think you’re muted. HASSAN: Sorry, yeah. No, I don’t have anything to add to that. COOK: OK, well then let me weigh in for just one second. I think that the tenor of some of the questions that I’ve asked imply the instrumentalization of religion. And I think that comes from both my—the work that I’ve done on Middle East politics, the work that I’ve done on Islamist movements, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood—which has clearly instrumentalized religion, spoken in a religious vernacular, in order to advance an inherently antidemocratic agenda. But this is obviously not an issue just in the Middle East. Let’s look at the way in which religion has been instrumentalized in the United States. And it’s not just a phenomenon of the last four years, the last ten years, the last twenty years. This is something that happens in which religion—it is easy to use religion, because it’s an important cultural touchstone, to advance political agendas, whether for good or for bad. But I think that the idea that religion is instrumentalized should not surprise us. I think what is interesting about the efforts that Marc is involved in, the efforts that—the things that Zaha is talking about, coexistence, is trying to instrumentalize religion for purposes of coexistence. That has been much, much, much harder to do over a period of time. We have more questions. I’m going to go to John Krysko. Can we unmute John? KRYSKO: There we go. OK, thank you. Rousseau famously said, “man is born free but everywhere he’s in chains.” One of the chains is the context that we view problems. Suppose the problem is not what man wants, but what God wants? That suppose that the concept of all the political things that are the human conditions are the very chains that keep us in there, and that religion, amongst others, spirituality, offers opportunities to transcend our own partisan, our own backgrounds? Building on what Marc was saying about the groundwork of what’s happening at so many levels—I know people in Palestine. I was a board member of the Interfaith Center of New York for eighteen years, have an organization on dialogue in Westchester between the three Abrahamic faiths. There’s an awful lot going on. It doesn’t reach the level of immediacy and the media. Is it possible to create—here’s the question. Long-winded opening. Is it possible to have a kind of a Camp David, a Parliament of World Religions focused on this particular topic? Because  honestly, humans are not doing a particular great job at solving this. And the odds that they’re going to do better in the future are not particularly great. So suppose we would get  some of these minds to say, well, this is what’s happening, and have a kind of a Jacob’s ladder—develop a process to find that stairway to peace? But right now there is no real process that is not purely—that is so colored by the political and the ideological differences. Is it—do you think that would have merit to consider something like that? COOK: I was hoping you’d say stairway to heaven, John. I’ll— KRYSKO: It’s OK. It’s— COOK: Marc and Zaha—Mark, Zaha, do you want to respond? HASSAN: I’ll let Marc take that one. GOPIN: OK. Well, I agree with the sentiment. And to understand the world of interfaith peacebuilding in the last fifty years, there’s very high-level work that’s very public, and it’s sort of nice interfaith work. And that’s necessary and good for diplomacy. And then there is secret work in order—in terms of problem solving with major leaders. And then there’s grassroots work. All of those are necessary. So I think what you’re suggesting is a great idea. But if it was hijacked by just state representatives of religion from around the region, I think that it would—I think it would not ring true with the average Palestinian or the average Jew. I think they would see it as kind of fake. But if the high-level work was accompanied by serious embrace and engagement between grassroots workers, who honestly confronted the real issues of employment, of safety, of security, of evictions, et cetera, then there’s a lot of people who, I think if they were given permission and allowed to meet and greet and negotiation, I think there would be a lot to be accomplished. But not if it’s just the mufti of so-and-so and the chief rabbi of so-and-so. Even though  David Rosen—Rabbi David Rosen and others have done very heroic work of keeping the channels open to many countries, I think it needs that plus some very serious private negotiations in the way that Sheikh Darwish, and Sheikh Falouji, and Rabbi Melchior and others have done in Israel in order to really build a serious political shift, and a shift that affects people’s lives and jobs. That’s where the money comes in. We have not had enough money that focuses on real improvements in human life, in dignity, that come out of religious coexistence. There used to be that. Even in Tiberias two hundred years ago, there are Hasidic-Muslim relationships that people don’t know about. There used to be a lot of wonderful Muslim-Jewish relationships in various countries, and we need to recreate that, even with the most conservative people on both sides. Then we will have to deal with militancy and with violence in the name of religion still. But I think we will be in a better position to create a better middle for coexistence and for equality in this region. COOK: Zaha, do you want to get in on this? HASSAN: Yeah. I just—I think that it’s really hard for many Palestinians to think about these kinds of conversations, because after Oslo there was a lot of these kinds of conversations taking place, not among religious leaders but among Palestinians and Jewish Israelis to understand each other. And the minute there was a challenge to that—it was in the Second Intifada that all of that dialogue blew up. And it hasn’t really come back online. And there’s such a negative connotation around these kinds of dialogues these days in the Palestinian community, because it’s seen as normalizing the occupation to have conversations while this power differential exists. And things are happening on the ground which change the status quo. I almost feel like  even as important as these conversations that you’re talking about at the religious-leadership level are taking place in Israel-Palestine, they need to be taking place in the U.S., because I think so much of what’s happening there is driven by a lot of our own politics here. And I think that having—if we can’t get it right among American Muslims and the American Jewish community here in the U.S., it’s hard to imagine, in a state of conflict, being able to make really big strides towards coexistence abroad. And I’ve seen it’s incredibly difficult in the U.S. to have a conversation, because a lot of times folks don’t really know what’s going on on the ground in Palestine and they don’t understand what the occupation really looks like. They haven’t seen it. It’s only when people actually go and have an opportunity to see what’s happening that they can come back and then have really meaningful dialogues across religious—I don’t want to say divides, but along religious lines. The kind of interfaith dialogue that is successful in the U.S. that I’ve been a part of has always kind of put Palestine-Israel to the side, like we’ll talk about any subject that you want to talk about, but don’t talk about this because that gets us into trouble. So I don’t know. I haven’t studied this issue. And I leave it to Marc to kind of enlighten us. But it’s been really challenging for me personally to try to engage in this kind of dialogue in the U.S. because it’s always—Palestine-Israel has always been marginalized in the conversation. GOPIN: Yeah, I agree with that. COOK: Thank you. GOPIN: Oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead, Steven. COOK: No, no, no. I just—quickly, I wanted—we have a number of questions in the queue, and I just want to make sure that we get to folks. GOPIN: Sure. COOK: So go ahead, Marc. Make your point, and then we’ll— GOPIN: You’re absolutely right that the Jewish-Muslim conversation in the United States is a social contract not to talk much about Israel. And I understand that. And that’s why I don’t see it as much of a solution. I’m much more interested in people in Umm al-Fahm speaking with people in Tel Aviv. I’m much more interested in people visiting in each other’s homes and working out real problems; say, police and security. I think that’s where the answers lie, in basic needs, in real needs, and narratives, and stories. And that’s—it can’t be dialogue. No, the dialogue in the Oslo period was terribly elitist and it really wasn’t affecting people’s lives nearly enough. But I think that’s where the answers are is real effects on people’s lives through solidarity of common needs. COOK: Riki, can you go ahead and read the next question in the Q&A queue? OPERATOR: Absolutely. Our next question comes from David Leslie, who’s the executive director of the Rothko Chapel in Houston. He asks, in this country how do we address the influence of Christian Zionism, characterized by pastors such as Reverend John Hagee, as well as more mainline Christian churches that seem to hold a Jewish exceptionalism which relegates Palestinians either to a secondary class or totally unknown? COOK: Marc, I think that’s probably directed to you. GOPIN: No, I’d like to hear Zaha’s opinion first. COOK: OK. HASSAN: Thanks. And first let me say hi to David Leslie. I think I know you, David, from Portland, Oregon. Thanks for that question. I wish I had an answer to that question, because that to me is the most critical question if we want to think about how to impact U.S. policy in all of this. And  I don’t know. I don’t know how you start to engage. As I said earlier in my remarks to the first question, I think things are changing in the evangelical community as well generationally. And so that kind of gives me some hope that this—the current situation, the current situation where you have  really conservative-minded Evangelicals really pushing the Republican Party in a direction that  is going to entrench what is today an apartheid situation, it’s very real. And I don’t think we’re going to see much change there, because there’s nothing challenging it. The hold that this passionate segment of the Republican Party has on the party is making it so that U.S. policy toward Israel-Palestine is going to swing wildly from one administration to the other as it changes from Democratic to Republican hands. And that’s not going to be—that’s not going to bode well for sensible Middle East policy and one that’s going to support Israeli-Palestine peacebuilding. So I’ll leave it to Marc to kind of come up with—(laughs)—some ideas about how, in the short term, we can change. But I think, at least trend-wise, in the long term this might be—this might change just because of the generational shift that’s taking place. GOPIN: Very quickly, the apocalyptic intentions of a John Hagee in buying Palestinian forests and turning them into Christian outposts, which he’s done in concert with radical settlers, I mean, that’s going to go on until the younger generation says, well, what kind of Christianity is this really? Is it a repetition of the Crusades? Is that really the focus of my religious life? And we see—as Zaha said, we see that changing among younger Evangelicals. The problem is that progressives don’t have much of a better solution. There isn’t really a serious approach to how to embrace both Jews and Palestinians at the same time instead of proxy warfare of choosing one side or another side. So part of the Christian community is choosing the Palestinians, and part is choosing the radical settlers. And that’s a mistake. It means that it cancels each other out. So what we need is a more visionary approach of a complete Christian embrace of both communities and of the holy land that leads to actual equality and dignity that would embrace the Sermon on the Mount for all people. I mean, that’s the kind of thing that we need that would be a wonderful Christian American contribution. But like I said, most of it is instrumentalized. And in the last administration it was a horrific shift towards a rather apocalyptic approach to ending Palestinian identity in a terrible way, which fits certain very radical approaches to the religious future of radical Christianity. We need an alternative, because otherwise people keep slipping into very destructive forms of polarization and instrumentalization. And I think that the peacebuilders in all three communities can do that together—the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Abrahamic community. But they have to have much more serious cooperation than just nice words and conferences. It needs to mean something to the Jew who’s looking, is this going to be a safe country in the future for Jews forever? And it needs to mean something to Palestinians, say am I going to be finally recognized for my country and our right to exist? COOK: OK. Riki, we have time for a number of other questions. And so far I have—most of those are in the chat. So can we get another one, please? OPERATOR: Yes. Our next question comes from Jim Brenneman. Hold on one moment. I’m so sorry. There was a technical issue on my end. He asks, could both of you speak to the next generations about the hope for a confederated or one-state solution? He’s from the Berkeley School of Theology. COOK: Zaha. HASSAN: Yeah the confederation is a really interesting idea that I think is getting a lot more attention these days, because the one-state and the two-state look so impossible at the moment. And that would basically involve allowing refugee return, which is a really important issue to Palestinians. It’s like the core issue for Palestinians. But it also allows for settlers to stay as well. But there would be—the Palestinians would vote for national elections for the Palestinian-state candidates, and then you’d have the Jewish Israeli citizens voting for the candidates in the national elections for Israeli candidates. So basically you would have a shared country but two separate communities living there and with voting accordingly. So this is an interesting idea because it doesn’t allow for displacement of people and, in fact, allows for refugee return. The problem is it’s—it isn’t the Zionist dream of a Jewish-majority state and it doesn’t satisfy, for many Israelis their attachment to the West Bank in particular. So, I mean, at the end of the day there has to be a rethinking, I think, of what it means to  live together and what it means to—what self-determination means for each community and how can we reconcile that in a way that allows both people to enjoy the land with dignity and with respect. But I do think confederation is a very interesting idea. I just don’t know that we have a constituency for that any more than we have a constituency for one state with equal rights or a two-state solution. So it’s going to take building that constituency. And I think that’s the kind of work that Marc’s doing. And that is so important, because we need that, first, in order to start to conceive of any kind of political solution. GOPIN: Just one small addition to that. I mean, it’s our job in history to invent things that don’t exist yet. That’s how human rights came about. That’s how the ideas of democracy came about. So sometimes it seems like pie in the sky, but sometimes it’s the good motivator to consider practical steps forward. And so I think the confederation people are doing some very good thinking. They’re building relationships across adversary lines, which is good. And those relationships are hopefully building more practical recommendations. For example, sometimes you take out, to Zaha’s point—excellent point—that this isn’t the Zionist state that people dreamed of. You really don’t have to talk the word confederation. All you have to do is say all evictions stop. No more hemorrhaging from Jerusalem of a couple of thousand people a year. All Jerusalem residents stay as residents. And nobody’s going to be evicted from anywhere. But you also say nobody’s going to be settling anywhere that’s not their land. And so if you just stopped the process of trying to take and started to say, no, everyone belongs, and you do it by international law and you enforce it with a way in which we agree, you don’t have to use a big word like confederation. You just have to say we’re stopping. Everyone belongs, and then we’re going to work it out, whether that’s one state, two states, or confederation. And I think that would go a long way to building trust. But I’ve always felt—and this is not a majority view, certainly among Zionists—but I always thought some bow to repatriation and to refugee return while a Jewish majority remains is something that would be a very, very powerful gesture of reconciliation and that would recognize the four hundred villages, but without sacrificing the Jewish dream of a safe majority space. And I think that that’s possible. But it takes that sense that everyone belongs, that both peoples belong there. COOK: Thank you. Riki, let’s try for one more. If Zaha and Marc can promise to be shorter in their answers, we can everything in in the next three and a half minutes. Thank you. OPERATOR: Great. So our final question comes from Michael Fried from the Dispute Resolution Center. He asks, can you give any historical examples where some sort of long-term peace or nonviolence was reached through religious leaders coming together? How was the accommodation reached in Northern Ireland? What role, if any, did religious leaders play? COOK: You have three minutes. GOPIN: Just—there are examples around the world of—for example, in various regions of Nigeria, with almost no resources, Imam Ashafa and Pastor Wuye singlehandedly stopped civil wars in their region. It took a great deal of education of their populations. They were warriors themselves that stopped. So we have—I can’t do it on one foot, but we have six books—Doug Johnson’s books, Joyce Dubensky’s books, my own books. We have a lot of examples, but all of them very underfunded so they don’t reach the level of whole states that were stopped that way. So, yes, there’s evidence. But there’s also evidence of the fact that this needs to fundamentally go more mainstream in the diplomatic community. COOK: Zaha. HASSAN: This is not my area. I’m going to refer everyone to Marc’s books. (Laughs.) COOK: That was very diplomatic of you. If that’s the case, we really are running out of time. And I’m afraid that if I ask for another question, we’re going to go over, which is a big no-no at the Council on Foreign Relations. So what I want to do is, in the last two minutes, if, Zaha, you want to have a—offer concluding remarks, followed by Marc, and then we can all sign off. HASSAN: Yeah, I want to thank everyone for asking these great questions and for CFR for hosting us. This is a really important topic. I think we’re going to have to start being much more creative in the way we think about Israel-Palestine moving forward. There has been a lot of dramatic change in U.S. policy that has impacted things on the ground in Israel-Palestine, unfortunately in a negative direction. And I think it’s going to take civil society, religious leaders, and anyone else that has an interest in peace to be working to help ameliorate the damage that’s been done and trying to reverse a lot of it. So I thank everyone for being with us today. And it was really good to be with you, Steven, and you, Marc. COOK: Marc, I know it’s not in a rabbi’s nature to be efficient with the words. But if you can, that’d be fabulous. GOPIN: Yeah, I just want to bless this process. I think it’s wonderful that the Council on Foreign Relations is addressing this issue, and remind everybody that leaders have a tremendous power to shift religions in either a good direction or bad direction. We’ve seen that in American history. We need more leadership embracing this process of shifting cultures and religions in the direction of serious peacebuilding. COOK: That’s perfect. Thank you all very, very much. Zaha, thank you for your time. Marc, thank you for your time. I want to thank Riki, who was reading the questions. That is harder than people might think it is. She did a wonderful job. And thank you all, and we look forward to seeing you at a future roundtable and webinar. Take care. Have a good day.

Farah Pandith, adjunct senior fellow at CFR, and Cynthia Miller-Idriss, professor at American University’s School of Public Affairs and School of Education and director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, discuss the post-9/11 resurgence of far-right violence, and lessons learned in the aftermath of the tragedy that can be applied in the fight against domestic terrorism. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program. FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Social Justice and Foreign Policy webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. As a reminder, today’s webinar is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org, and on our iTunes podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Farah Pandith and Cynthia Miller-Idriss with us today to talk about the changing landscape of terrorism in the United States. We shared their bios, so I will just go through and give a few highlights. Farah Pandith is an adjunct senior fellow at CFR, a foreign policy strategist, and a former diplomat. She is a pioneer in the field of countering violent extremism, or CVE, and served as a political appointee in both Bush administrations, and the Obama administration. She served on the secretary of homeland security’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, where she chaired the Subcommittee on Countering Violent Extremism. And she was the first special representative to Muslim communities, appointed in June 2009 by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. She’s the author of the book How We Win: How Cutting-Edge Entrepreneurs, Political Visionaries, Enlightened Business Leaders, and Social Media Mavens Can Defeat the Extremist Threat. Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a professor at American University’s School of Public Affairs and School of Education, and runs a polarization and extremism research and innovation lab in the Center for University Excellence. She has testified before Congress and regularly briefs different agencies in the U.S., the United Nations, and other countries on trends in domestic violent extremism, and strategies for prevention and disengagement. She serves on the International Advisory Board of the Center for Research on Extremism in Oslo, Norway. She’s also a member of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Tracking Hate and Extremism Advisory Committee. She is the author of several books, including Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right. She has also authored a recent piece in Foreign Affairs entitled “From 9/11 to 1/6: The War on Terror Supercharged the Far Right.” So thank you both for being with us today. This is a huge topic to cover. A lot of years to understand the history and where we are now. Cynthia, let’s start with you to talk about the ways in which the face of terrorism in America has changed over the past twenty years. MILLER-IDRISS: Thanks, Irina, thank you for the invitation. It’s such an honor to be here and I’m excited to hear the questions from the audience as well. And it’s a great first question. Of course, I could go on for hours to respond to that, so I’ll try to give you the Cliff Notes version of this. Which is to say that it comes as no surprise to anyone in the audience, or really anyone who’s followed the news at all, to know that after 9/11 there was a complete laser focus, I would say, pivoting of global, and national security, and intelligence attention to the threat from international or Islamist forms of extremism. And, we had, of course, many prior waves in this country and elsewhere of what is called often—and I should say the classification terms are difficult here—but I use the term “far-right” to capture white supremacist extremism, but also some anti-government forms of extremism. And we’d had prior waves of that culminating, for example, in the Oklahoma City bombing in the U.S. in 1995, which took the lives of 168 people. But 9/11 really pivoted the attention completely—almost completely, in terms of how resources were distributed. And I should say, not that people weren’t necessarily paying attention, but the political will and the funding wasn’t always there, as I know Farah will agree on that, and we’ve just been chatting about that. But the official attention, the resources, the political will was really dedicated here and abroad to the threat from Islamist extremism. Even around 2008/2009, just after President Obama was elected, we began to see a serious spike both in hate group membership, in the numbers of hate groups, and in the growth of new unlawful militia and anti-government extremist movements like the Oath Keepers or the Three Percenters. These are kind of revolution-oriented or even civil war-oriented unlawful militia or patriot militia movements that seek to thwart what they believe are tyrannical government actions, ultimately culminating in something like 1/6 in the long-run. So there was a steady growth going on for well over a decade. We saw that in episodic terrorist violence, in Oslo in 2011, in places like Charleston in a church, and then at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. A lot of houses of worship, of course. And then Christchurch, New Zealand, followed rapidly by, of course, there was Pittsburgh first, then Christchurch, followed rapidly by El Paso and other places—synagogues and other attacks here and abroad on religious institutions largely, in addition to targeting ethnic groups, like in that Walmart in El Paso. So we’ve been seeing rising terrorist violence, rising extremist violence, mainstreaming and normalization of extremist ideas, which we saw in things like the Unite the Right rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, where you had scores of young men marching across the college campus unmasked, with their faces uncovered, chanting “Jews will not replace us”—I mean, real propaganda. And then a steady growth in attitudes and plots even that were foiled, and then the spread of propaganda really well documented on any number of measures. That eventually did lead in the fall of 2020 to the Department of Homeland Security in its annual threat assessment declaring that domestic violent extremism in general, and white supremacist extremist in particular, is the most persistent and lethal threat facing the nation, facing the homeland. Most threat assessments in Europe continue to track Islamist forms of extremism as representing the greatest threat, but are increasingly describing far-right extremism as the fastest-growing threat. So there’s some slight differences in how the threat assessments are described, which I can get into in Q&A, but there’s no question, I think, that in terms of lethality, in terms of global percentage of deaths, for example, far-right extremism represented 82 percent of terrorist deaths in 2019 globally across the West. So we have a number of measures that pose to its serious nature, and the pivoting of the threat, and really a pretty delayed reaction to it in terms of the resources, the attention, and the willingness to address it. I think a lot of that changed on January 6. And we saw shortly after that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sort of slightly revise the threat assessment to note that it’s not just white supremacist extremism but also anti-government extremism, as a form of anti-government extremism that poses the most persistent threat. And I think that that’s true. But we now have quite serious attention, Pentagon issuing its first ever stand down order. We have serious attention in the form of hearings and a number of other committees going on. Sort of the springing into action around the globe, I think, to start to think about solutions. But my negative assessment, and I’ll get into that finally. I’ll just conclude to say it’s still very little very late in terms of the kind of resources that are being devoted in the U.S. I would say much better resources are being devoted overseas in terms of prevention, particularly in Germany and in New Zealand in its response to Christchurch. And I’m happy to get into that in the Q&A. But I’ll stop there. That’s an attempt to kind of do a Cliff Notes thumbnail sketch of the past two decades in a pretty short period of time. FASKIANOS: That was great. Farah, let’s go to you to talk about counterterrorism strategies and practices, and how they’ve changed, and what you see that we need to be doing. PANDITH: Well, first of all, I just wanted to say good afternoon to everybody. And I wanted to highlight the fact that there are three women taking part of this panel. And that’s a terrific thing, because usually you do not see that. So that’s one thing I just want to say. Cynthia’s excellent synopsis of where we’ve been and where we’re going is sobering. And I agree with everything that she had to say. I want to take a step back, though, and talk about the ideology that moves people to think about the “us versus them,” which is really at the heart and the core of all of these different kinds of terrorist organizations. You may believe different things, but ultimately it is an “us versus them” scenario. And it is rooted in how you think about yourself, and identity, and belonging. And that’s essential to say, because I think that the U.S. government—and we can talk about how international actors have responded to this differently—but our assessment of the forces that move the human emotions have been off. We have not been ahead of the game. We have been playing catch up. We have been thinking about what we think we see in front of us, and analyzing, and articulating a response that is for the very second that we’re dealing with it. There has been very little long-term forecasting of where this is going to be, which has resulted in too little, too late. And it is dramatically shocking to me that here we are in 2021, where in the homeland we are dealing with the kinds of threats that we’re dealing with from the ideology of “us versus them,” when societal sinkholes have been exposed in our country around political lines, around other lines. The audience is American, so you all have been living it with us. These things have pulled apart societies. Communities haven’t come together. You add to that what’s been happening with the technology revolution over the last twenty years, and you see a very sobering sight. And you see an activation of hate and extremism that no one could have imagined. And what that means is that the solutions that we were looking at, right, when we were shocked and appalled at 9/11, and we didn’t know how to handle it, and how do we prevent something like this from happening? We were looking obviously at the kinetic response. How do we make sure al Qaeda doesn’t come back to our country? But soon after that we began to think about, well, how do you build the prevention models within communities so that the people that they’re trying to recruit are not finding this ideology appealing? And, everybody knows twenty years later that it’s a whole of society thing. We’ve been talking about this for fifteen or twenty years. Obviously, it is not just government. It is nonprofits. It is philanthropy. It is business. We know all of that. We know that solutions are local. We know that faith leaders matter. We know that community leaders—and we know all of this stuff. What’s the problem now? The problem has been that while we have piloted some exceptional programs—early days after 9/11, for example, using faith leaders to help us get into communities, for example. Using former extremists to tell their story, whether you’re former FARC, or former al Qaeda, or former Neo-Nazi. I want to tell you how I was recruited, why it was appealing to me, how I left. Those are really important stories to be able to tell. Whether it is education programs in schools—I mean, we piloted many different kinds of things in our country. Meaning, we supported those kinds of things. But we were not looking at the homeland. Our assumption was we got it here. We don’t have the problems that other countries have. We’ll be OK. And how foolhardy is that, to look at that right now, because ideology has no borders. So something that is happening in Oslo affects the guy in New Zealand, right? We learned that the hard way. So when I look at the response, Irina, what I see is good intentions. I see some creative thinking. But I see a very slow and unsteady response in both the scale and the understanding of the global nature of this ideology, and how it pings across the world. We aren’t talking about recruits coming from generations that are much older. We are looking at Millennials. We are looking at Gen Z. And we’re looking at Gen Alpha. We, as the United States, ought to be thinking about how to protect our communities—a fifty-state plan—that allows us to go deep on cultural intelligence so that we understand how the emotions, psychologically, and spiritually, and community-wise are shaping the way people think about their identity, because that absolutely impacts the ability for somebody who’s recruiting that person to do something. So all of this to tell you in the good news category, it’s not like we haven’t tried anything and we don’t know what’s going to work. In the bad news category, it’s, well, what are we doing about scale? While I absolutely am delighted to see a change in the numbers of the amount of money that’s going out in terms of grants to local communities to do work, I’m distressed because I look at the landscape in the years ahead. We cannot expect to get a handle on the ability to build inoculation, and resilience, and prevention on $20 million a year. I mean, that is outrageous. So how do we think differently about this? And then the final thing I just want to say is on the way in which we approached handling preventative strategies in the ideological space, we did it like this: This is the kind of extremism we’re talking about, so here are the kinds of programs we think are going to work for AQ or ISIS. This might work for Neo-Nazis. We have done very little analysis in terms of the nuance within those groups. I don’t see specific programs for how women are getting radicalized. I don’t see specific programs for how you look at young people who are in the Gen Alpha category, for example. So we can do better to say how do we think about the child and adolescent mind? What do we learn from the social scientists that can apply to how we build these programs? What are community leaders saying that they need? For example, the resources on the mental health side, which we are not actually doing properly. All of these things can dramatically shift the safety structure and the safety landscape for our country if we do this right. FASKIANOS: Thank you, both of you. Very powerful. Let’s go to all of you now for your questions and comments. And I can’t believe we have no questions. We do. All right. Syed Sayeed. Be sure to unmute yourself. SAYEED: OK. Good afternoon and thank you to you, first, the Council on Foreign Relations, to organize this forum. And thanks to both the speakers. They have very powerfully stated their introductory framework for all of us to think. My point is that the religious—what shall I say—authorities from Muslims, Christians, Jews are not playing the kind of role that they need to play. Because it doesn’t matter what religion you are talking about, the philosophy of all religions is looking after the humans, and have a framework in which the human individual and human groups can grow and develop in a way that they are going to be stronger in individual roles and group roles, to contribute to the betterment of their own groups and other human groups. I mean, that’s the bottom line of Christianity, of Judaism, of Islam. The wellbeing of humanity is uppermost in all religious thinking. So if the religious leaders around the world can spell this out very clearly for their followers, and for others, it might become a very important factor in the future. They are not playing that kind of role. And I hope and pray that they realize that they have a responsibility, not just a choice but a religious responsibility, to spell out the nature of wellbeing they’re trying to cultivate individuals and groups. And I hope and pray—and I pray that the speakers and the Council on Foreign Relations do play a role to bring about this kind of focus of the international religious authorities. Thank you for the opportunity to make my point. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Syed. Farah and Cynthia, do you see that the faith community and faith leaders have—that there has been enough done by faith leaders? Or what more could they do? I mean, practical advice on what can be done in their communities, in their synagogues, and churches, et cetera? MILLER-IDRISS: Well, I think that there has been—first of all, thank you to the participant for the helpful comment. And I think that we agree. I think when you have people who are adhering to the tenants of their faith communities, you typically see people who are resisting extremism and working toward a common humanity. What we often see, though, is some manipulation within communities of disinformation, or propaganda, or scapegoating that can exploit, in some cases, across any faith community, some of the tenets of those beliefs. And so I think what we have been seeing over the last few years has been what we call kind of secondary prevention resources being devoted to faith communities to better reinforce prevention of violence by equipping people—what I call equipping the people at the synagogue doors to make sure they can thwart a violent attacker effectively. I mean, it’s important, but it’s not the kind of prevention that I really feel like we need, which is more primary prevention in terms of helping truly inoculate populations against the spread of disinformation, and propaganda, and conspiracy theories in ways that help them recognize and resist from within the mainstream the outreach that comes to them from the fringes. And so I should say, in full disclosure, my research lab is one of the teams that got DHS money that was announced just last week in partnership with the Multi-Faith Neighbors Network in Tarrant County, Texas, and Search for Common Ground, to build a toolkit for faith communities by working with and partnering with faith communities in Texas. And then hopefully we will be empirically testing it to ensure that it is effective as a primary prevention to helping people be inoculated against, recognize, and be more resilient to propaganda and disinformation and extremist ideas. And then hopefully we’ll be able to scale up. There is a plan for scaling up as well if it’s effective. But so there is—so, I’m intimately familiar with one effort, because we’re a part of it and we launch tomorrow, October 1, that work, with our first kick-off meeting. And so we’re about to begin that. And I hope that it’s the start of—and that began because a faith community member reached out to us. So we do—asking for help and assistance. And then we went after—we decided to do it and went after funding to support it. But I absolutely agree that part of the trouble here is a tremendous lack of resources compared to what other countries have to really engage in both the kind of pilot testing we need and the scaling up, along with the evidence and the transparency about what works. We just don’t have anywhere near the kinds of resources that we need to do it. I mean, we’re just scratching the surface. So it’s—I think if we don’t really see either private sector donors step up or the federal government step up, we’ll just be scrambling along to sort of pick up the trails of what’s—little crumbs of things, rather than really trying to build something that’s more comprehensive. That’s my disclaimer about the negative, my pessimistic side. It’s that we just don’t have enough resources. But the optimistic side is that the will is there, I think. The understanding of the need is there. And the creative energy is there. And we’re certainly seeing that from within the faith community as well. FASKIANOS: Great. And Syed, now everybody has raised their hands, which is fantastic, with written questions. So thank you for getting us started. So let’s go next to Tereska Lynam. And you need to unmute yourself. LYNAM: Sorry. FASKIANOS: There you go. LYNAM: So mine is actually a comment that I’d like your reaction from. FASKIANOS: Can you identify yourself, Tereska? LYNAM: Sorry. Tereska Lynam, University of Oxford. And I have been traveling a lot recently, both within the U.S. and internationally. And I’ve never in my life had so many—heard so many political moderates, both inside and outside of the U.S., mention, kind of apropos of nothing, that they believe that the U.S. is headed for a civil war. And I would like to hear your—if you have any reaction to that, what your—if you’ve seen maybe the same thing, or—I don’t know. Thank you. (Laughs.) PANDITH: Tereska, it’s interesting that you’re saying that. I used the term “social sinkholes” when I was giving my overview. And I think that there is deep despair in the United States that is being felt in new ways because we’re able to access things with a swish of our finger on our phones. And so you’re getting a consistent feedback loop on a whole host of different things—both feeling optimistic, and negative, and confused, and whatever you—and fearful. And I think it’s the fear of some of these things that are driving some of those conversations, because we haven’t seen it at this level in this way. No one has a crystal ball to be able to say we’re heading this way or that way, but we certainly know one thing. And that is if we do not talk about the changes that have happened, and why we think they are happening, and address them, we’re in a completely—to use the term “unprecedented” is ridiculous, because post-COVID no one has seen this. But there’s a movement that I concur with you that I have also seen, policymakers as well as political commentators, thought leaders, and others, who are filled with confusion and despair because they don’t know the way out, because they haven’t seen a model that looks familiar to them that they can figure out what’s the strategy to go forward. That’s my response to it. I also just wanted to say a word about the faith leader thing, just to—I agree with what Cynthia said. And I think there is activation in a new way. There has always been, in my opinion, great desire from faith leaders of all kinds to be helpful in the fight against hate and extremism. That’s been my experience since 9/11. But I also agree with the point that there are also negative influences in the faith community that want to stoke a fire in a particular way. And I certainly have seen that, we can see that in our own country with, I mean, somebody like Terry Jones, who most people forget, but he made a huge difference to the way in which Muslims understood themselves in America, in terms from a safety point of view. But also the way Muslims around the world understood what they believed America to be, because he was going to burn the Quran. So there are aspects to this that are really important. And one last point, when we talk about faith leaders. I just want to make the point, with the change in the kind of fear that we’re looking at right now around ideology—from the violent far-right and particularly the white supremacist movements—you haven’t seen a reaction in America that is asking Christian leaders to talk about what Christianity stands for in the way in which after 9/11 they demanded that everybody that, quote, “looked Muslim” said something about the fact that AQ did not represent Islam. And I’m not—I’m simply saying this for one reason: The universe and the expectations have shifted over twenty years. And what we see as necessary has shifted over twenty years. And I think that there is great need to reassess what we ask for from our own neighbors and from our faith leaders and our community leaders in this moment in time. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go to a written question from Abbas Barzegar. And, Abbas, do you want to just ask it yourself? OK. BARZEGAR: Yeah, I’m happy to do so. FASKIANOS: Oh, great. Wonderful. And identify yourself. It’s great to hear from you. BARZEGAR: I’m Abbas Barzegar here, now with a group called Horizon Forum. And we work on informing philanthropy and grant-making institutions about domestic hate groups and extremist groups. So the question was around cultural intelligence. Farah, you mentioned this. And I just—it’s a friendly question, asked in good faith. But one of the direct grievances that is often mentioned by domestic extremist groups and hate groups is government surveillance, government intrusion into the community, et cetera. And so I worry about—I’d like to hear more about what you think is an effective strategy there? Because I would hate for government to play an increasing polarizing role in the field, to become a participant in the polarization rather than some—an actor that can deescalate the tension. PANDITH: Abbas, I’m so glad you asked that question. And I take with the spirit that you intend it. And I too agree with you, we don’t want a security state upon us. However, that’s not what I meant. (Laughs.) So culture—I have a piece coming out with sparks & honey that—which is a cultural intelligence firm in New York—that will go into great detail here. But as I looked at the experimentation over the last twenty years on how we can be predictive and forecast better, the only tools in our toolbox around that was human intelligence. It was really trying to—trying to gather—the old forms of information. And I thought to myself: If we’re able to predict years in advance that veganism is going to be on the rise, or cannabis is going to be the thing that everybody’s talking about, or that this product is what everybody’s going to be using in their households, why is it that we cannot understand through our daily lives—this is not surveillance. This is information that marketing firms have. This is not going to mosques and churches and spying behind a pew or a thing. That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the touchpoints that put together signals that are able to tell you: Something really interesting is happening with Generation Z. They’re moving in this direction just the same way we can tell they’re becoming more directive around what products they buy because of what the companies stand for. Just the same way we can tell that Gen Alpha, even though they’re super young, are going to be moving in a direction that’s very different from their parents, who are Millennials. And this is why, because these are the things that have been around them. This is what they’ve been exposed to. But that requires us to be alert and on it with the signals that we see, not signals that we’re gathering in super secret, horrifying ways. And I feel very strongly that one of the missing pieces in understanding society is that we’re not looking at society. We’re not seeing things. We’re compartmentalizing  what brands people are going to buy, or what products might be interesting. And that may be fine for the bottom line of a company, but I want to understand from an emotional and psychological thing, could we have understood twenty-five years ago, because of the signals that we were seeing within society, the way people were acting, talking, buying things, doing things—could we have built a map that said: Something really odd is happening around identity and belonging? And this fear around America not being white—a predominantly White nation is going to have an effect in a way that is really X, Y, or Z. Could we have done that? That is the question I’m asking myself. And I look at the trajectory of the hybrid extremisms, the surge in money and organization and all of the things that we know are happening in the terrorist front, and I am really worried about the future. And so what I am asking myself is: How do we forecast better? What can we think about and do differently? So that is what I mean by cultural intelligence. I am not talking about a police state that is—we already know that Apple and Google and whatever are taking our data, and all that. That’s not—it is understanding how to put those pieces together with social scientists and others who can say: These are indicators for societal change in this particular way. I hope that I explained that. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Simran Jeet Singh, with The Aspen Institute’s Inclusive America Project. Simran, do you want to ask your question? All right, so I’m going to ask it. So thanks to you both for your presentation. And his question is regarding the role of race and religion in relation to how we perceive threats. To what extent do you see Christianity animating the surge of far-right white nationalism in the U.S.? And what effective responses, if any, have you seen that might serve as good models for us? MILLER-IDRISS: Well, I can start by saying I think,  the way that I typically describe this is what—there are two major sides to the far-right extremist spectrum. One is—and they intersect and overlap with each other. But one is sort of anti-government, anti-democratic, authoritarian, refusal to protect minority rights, et cetera, et cetera. The other is based on a range of supremacisms. And the idea of supremacism, the most common expression in the United States historically, and the one that has posed and still poses the most lethal threat in terms of terrorism, is white supremacy—white supremacist extremism. But we also have Western supremacy. We have Christian supremacy. We have male supremacy. In ways—I mean, we’ve seen rising incel—involuntary celibate—violence and terrorist actions against women. We have seen the self-described Western chauvinist Proud Boys, who are, very, and increasingly, across Europe in particular, a very strong anti-Islam and Islamophobic ideologies couched as pro-Western, right? So what you have are far-right groups, and political parties even position themselves as protecting women’s and LGBTQ rights because they argue that those are Western values that have to be protected from a threat—that supposed threat of Sharia law. And of course, we saw that here with forty-three states putting forward over the past twenty years actual legislation to anti-Sharia legislation. So we have this real deep Christian supremacy, even—or couched sometimes as Western supremacy—that is really baked in many ways to this Islamophobic and anti-Islam thinking that also often bleeds into anti-immigrant scapegoating in general. And it’s policies even that either are explicitly kind of Muslim bans or that are using fearmongering and scapegoating against immigrants to kind of stoke that same type of fear and protectionist idea of an existential threat that’s coming. So that’s a kind of rambling way of saying: Yes, there absolutely is. Even when it’s not explicit. I think even when we don’t hear explicit pro-Christian or sort of Christian extremist thinking—although there is, of course, Christian nationalism and Christian white nationalism going on. When we don’t hear it, it’s often coded as Western or even as anti-immigrant, where Western is framed as superior, right? And a lot of even language we’re hearing right now around immigrants at the border supposedly carrying COVID, right, that that is—that the source of—I mean, very anti-science, right? Anti—not—explaining disease in ways that are very typical for the scapegoating of immigrants historically over time, and not rooted in the science of how this disease is spreading, and why, and where. So that’s a longwinded explanation and way of saying that I think we have to be looking at these intersections around the way that supremacism works. And that even when white supremacy isn’t explicit ideology that’s stated, or sometimes denied, right? We have groups that are denying that they’re white supremacists but positioning themselves as Western supremacists. There’s often a civilizational kind of rhetoric or language behind it that is still—and I think very much traces back also to the post-9/11 climate. I mean, we have to understand that, of the real Islamophobia industry and its efforts to stoke Islamophobia in the population, and the way that that fostered an anti-immigrant and pro-Western kind of ideology. So and then the only thing I will say about the solutions here is that we need to involve faith communities, but we also need to help understand at a very basic level, within the education system, what does it mean to have supremacist kind of thinking across the board? How does that intersect with male supremacisms, Western supremacisms? Because it’s everywhere. It’s baked into the history of this country and it’s baked into  everything from gender pay gaps to all kinds of things, right? I mean, the fact that Farah mentioned right at the beginning that there are three women here, that is also—I am often the only woman in the room in these kinds of conversations. And I’m sure you are too, Farah. So that is really, really notable. And just the history of how these types of assumptions get made about who has a voice and who speaks is also part of this story. So I think we need to engage faith communities. But it has to be part of a much bigger set of engagements about how to combat supremacism as a rule, even as we combat the most lethal threat from that, which is white supremacist extremism. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m now going to next to Ani Zonneveld. ZONNEVELD: Hi. Good morning, good afternoon. Ani Zonneveld, Muslims for Progressive Values. Thank you for pointing out the importance of culture. And there’s clearly a lot of good ideas out there. But culture is so poorly funded. And as you look at the plethora of problems that we have, the religious influence on culture, that connection is really underestimated by our policymakers. The costs of changing hearts and minds, from my experience with working with religious leaders who are human rights affirming, it just took five years to do that. And it took less than $270,000 to do that in one country, which is the cost of one bomb. Our foreign policy of bomb and rebuild, bomb and rebuild does not work. At what point are we going to wake up to a more enlightened foreign policy and the funding that goes into it? Number one. Number two, the success of the Taliban and the response from the Muftis of the world congratulating the Taliban was shocking and appalling. And these are Muftis representing governments, right? These are—as you know, probably Farah—the Muftis are not just some ad hoc committees. They are set up by governments. What do we have and what powers do we have in our funding policies with these governments in reigning in this radical influence? Thank you. PANDITH: Ani, it’s great to see you on this screen. I hope that you’ve been well through this pandemic. Well, there are two things I want to say—(laughs)—about your excellent points. The first is, I look to the American public to ask their elected leaders why they are spending so little on soft power. I mean, that is fundamentally the bottom line. If we, as members of our country, don’t demand a more realistic assessment of the power of soft power, we’re going to get what we got. And we have—I did an assessment with folks around soft power. And when I asked, do you know how much money we spent on trying to stop ISIS using the ideology of ISIS compared to how much we used in the kinetic war, people would imagine it was 15 percent, 20 percent, 25 percent. And I said it was 0.0138 percent. That is how much money—because we don’t value it. We say we do, but we don’t. So the only way to change that on the foreign policy side is to demand that Congress give more money to our instruments of soft power across government, but also demand that—and this is a really important point—I think we are one of the most generous nations in the world on the philanthropic side. And there is a lot of money that goes to incredible causes in our nation. And I’m really proud of that as an American. But I have firsthand experience over twenty years of asking foundations, family foundations, large foundations, private philanthropists, begging and pleading with them to give money towards fighting the ideology of “us versus them.” Eyes glaze over first. Secondly, there is this problem of—and the Congress had the same problem—can you prove to us that if we give you this dollar that that person will never be radicalized? Well, no. I can’t. I mean, how can I prove? How can I promise you that? That is the metric they are expecting. And so you got very little money from NGOs going into helping—sorry, very little money from philanthropists given to NGOs which are doing the bulk of the work, and should be. And one of the big things that I have a problem with is you’re asking NGOs to fight for money to do this really important work, which often means that they have to review really horrible videos and information that they’re getting. Beheading videos or horrible things that they’re seeing on TikTok or, pick your social media platform. And there’s no support on the mental health side or anything for these NGOs, because they’re so small. They’re not Facebook. (Laughs.) They’re not—they don’t have quiet rooms and free food, OK? These are NGOs that are fighting for every dollar. Why am I saying all this? I 100 percent agree with what you’re saying about why our value system is shifted. But it is not just government. It is also where philanthropy must put their money as well. Then your second question on—or, comment, rather, on the Taliban and other organizations—other nation-states that have religious instruments that support what the Taliban is doing. It is outrageous that we aren’t doing more to call them out. I mean, Ani, you and I have had the conversation about Saudi Arabia. You and I have had the conversation about what I saw around the world with the billions of dollars they spent over decades to transform the way people think about what it means to be Muslim, so there’s a monolithic way that you must be. But America and other nations—it’s not just the United States—have to be clear about what they stand for in this way. You are 100 percent right when you say we have nations like Pakistan who are openly talking about how great it is that they are—that they’re going forward doing the work of—that no one else could do. The Taliban is doing really, really well. You don’t see America following up in the way in which we would expect them to. So all of the points that you are saying are correct. But it comes down, from my perspective, to what the American citizen demands of our elected leaders, and how we articulate that. FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to go next to Sharon Welch who has written, I think, two questions and raised her hand. So why don’t you just ask the one that you want. WELCH: One of the things that I’m interested in is if you’ve found anything that’s successful in countering the spread of disinformation. I’m now working for League of Women Voters. When we talk about free and fair elections, and the difficulty of misinformation, I know there was a recent study from MIT that showed that even with amplification false information spread more quickly than true information. So what projects are you seeing that’s helping counter that? MILLER-IDRISS: I’m so glad you asked. (Laughs.) Because I run a research lab that has spent the past year pilot testing a number of things to see what works. And we’re now in the scale-up phase and expansion phase. And to our great delight, everything we tested—from an animated video about the Boogaloo, to acted videos on—inoculation videos on white supremacy, scientific racism, and male supremacist content, and anti-vax content. And then a parent’s—a series of resources for parents and caregivers—everything was effective in all of our pre and post testing and assessment of what worked. In different ways, though. So we have some of those findings up on our website, others out in preprint. I’m happy to try to share them. We’re trying to—one of the struggles of this work is that there’s never enough public communication about what we know. Now we know a lot of things, and we’re trying to figure out what’s the best way to get it to the public. But, for example, we built every source for parents and caregivers, and a whole series of resources for teachers, coaches, mental health practitioners, others who work with youth, in partnership with the Southern Poverty Law Center. We have built out a dedicated website, which I’ll drop in the chat. But one of the things we did was test that resource with 755 parents and caregivers to see what they learned. Did they improve their ability to recognize warning signs of extremist radicalization? And did they feel more empowered to intervene if they did see those signs in a child that they knew? And one—it was really fascinating. It moved the needle in the right direction on every single measure, except for one group with one measure. Which is that the most educated group of parents did not improve their ability to recognize disinformation as a result of our intervention. And the reason why is because they came in so confident—so much more confident than everybody else that they already knew how to do that. And then they engage in our intervention, read our resource. And they got less confident, because they realized then how coded this stuff is, how complicated it is when kids encounter it through means and online gaming sites, in emojis, in anime, all kinds of places online that they weren’t anticipating, through coded speech, in really difficult youth cultural ways. And they got less confident. So we saw that as a win, because we corrected what we see as overconfidence, essentially. But it also taught us that that group of parents was never going to reach out to that resource on their own, because they didn’t think they need it. And so one of the things we’re trying to do, every partnership we engage in, every research project we do, every intervention we do have evidence associated with it. So we do agree to engage with the city, for example, and mayor’s office right now, but only if we’re allowed to pilot test and do pre and post testing and evidence. Because we really want commitment to transparency on all the measures. So we have our full reports, all of the instruments up and available, for example, on that whole SPLC study. So we have found our video-based inoculations moved the needle, helped people be less persuaded by extremist propaganda. So I’m happy to share that. You can visit our website. I’ll drop it in the site. But there is some good evidence, including from our lab, about what works. But it doesn’t always work the same way for every person, I guess is what I would sum up. FASKIANOS: That’s fantastic. And after this webinar we’ll send out the link to this video as well as links to Cynthia’s resources. So everybody, if you don’t get it in the chat we will circulate it, and anything that Farah wants to send out as well, because we want to disseminate good information and have you share it with your networks and in your communities. So I’m going to go next to Thomas Uthup, who has raised his hand and also written his question. Tom, over to you. UTHUP: Hi. Thank you very much for this discussion, which has been fascinating. Yes, my—it’s actually a two-part question. But before I say that I wanted to thank CFR, and Irina, and Professor Miller-Idriss, and Farah Pandith for this fascinating discussion. Professor Idriss, please say hi to Shamil for me. Both of you have touched on the global element of this far-right extremism, but I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on the ideological, beyond the inspirational, direct inspiring Christchurch, and online connections between far-right groups across the world. I remember twenty years ago doing some research on one of the extremist groups in India, which actually duplicated the language used by Hitler in Mein Kampf, but sort of Hitler’s language about the Jews, these people just substituted Muslims. But everything else was exactly the same. Also, one thing that has puzzled me is how the far-right groups in the U.S. seem to attract minorities. For example, Enrique Tarrio, at least to me, seems like a Hispanic leader of the Proud Boys. And you would think that that they would not find these kinds of groups attractive. And the same thing, I think Ali Alexander is African-American but born a Muslim. Thank you. MILLER-IDRISS: Well, thank you, Mr. Uthup. I’ll try to answer these quickly. I’d love to hear Farah’s answer to these as well. But on the second question, that gets to that issue of supremacisms and the intersecting supremacisms that I talked about, because one of the things we see is that we do have members of ethnic minorities joining groups across the far-right spectrum that are, in this case, ostensibly and officially not white supremacists, but are Western supremacists and misogynistic. And so you have groups that are attracting people based on the idea of anti-immigrant, or anti-Islam, or a Western civilizational rhetoric that  obviously is linked to white supremacy and white supremacist thinking, but is not officially—is a related form of extremism. And I think when you see that people are attracted to this supremacist kind of thinking in different expressions—and the far-right is a—includes a spectrum of those expressions that intersect and mutually reinforce each other, but don’t always come out in the same exact way—then I think it makes a bit more sense. On the global question, I’ll just say that  there are a lot of things to say about that, about the global interconnectedness. But one of the things that’s happened over the last ten years or so that is really important at mobilizing white supremacist extremisms, is the emergence of a consolidated conspiracy theory called the great replacement, which united what had been an American-based conspiracy theory called white genocide with a European conspiracy theory called Arabia. This idea that different groups were responsible for it but that through demographic change and immigration there was the eradication of white civilizations or of European ones. That came together for complicated reasons that I’ve written about and can explain in depth another time, in something called the great replacement. And that now has mobilized. And it enables basically—we’ve seen Jews be attacked for it, we’ve seen Muslims be attacked for it, we’ve seen Latinos be attacked for it. It enables the target groups to be diverse. Anyone who threatens white or Western civilizations is a target because through demographic change and immigration they’re seen as an existential threat. And then people are called upon to act heroically to thwart it. And I think that that’s really important, this idea that people are drawn for kind of positive reasons. And it sounds twisted. They believe they are engaged in a quest to make a real difference that is, even if they see themselves as martyrs, to inspire others. And so that’s global, because it’s seen as a threat—at least, it’s global across Western civilizations—seen as a threat from immigration demographic change, this idea of a genocide or a replacement. They even will compare that, and have compared the experience of white civilizations, to Native Americans. That’s a frequent trope. I’ve heard it for twenty-five years, this idea that white civilizations are going to be forced onto reservations because immigrants will eradicate them, just as they did the Native American tribes. So we saw that in a recent manifesto of the terrorist in El Paso, for example. So those kinds of—that level of existential threat and fear is what’s at the root. But it’s global now, and in ways that have made it much more powerfully shared across online spaces. I could go on, but I have to stop, I think, to—I really want to hear what Farah has to say about this as well. PANDITH: I just want to add one small thread to the question about sort of—you’ve talked about your experience in India and taking Hitler and making it fit for what they want to do. And obviously—I just want to remind people that what we’re seeing right now in terms of the sophistication, if we can use that word, and savviness from these groups is really quite dramatic. It’s almost like a uniform that people use to sort of build that spirit. There is a—they share memes, they adopt memes. They’re looking at successful models to see what worked. As evil and horrible as ISIS was, they were really successful. (Laughs.) I mean, they were very successful. They got people from all over the world to come to the so-called caliphate. There was a look, there was a feel, there was an image, there was a whole thing all set up. So even though you may not buy into the ISIS ideology, boy, you want to do what they did so that you can get their money, their organization, their look, their power. So you do see other kinds of groups going, OK, if they were doing it this way, or this was the way they recruited, this is the way they raised money. We’re going to do it too. So I think we—this goes back to my theme of understanding the complexity of the moment we are in today, alongside the most obvious things which are obviously the technology landscape has completely shifted everything. But there’s a financial piece also that I just want to highlight, because that is making it possible for this global movement—whatever it is—to be activated. They are not going to be able to do the work that they’re doing if they weren’t funded, and they were not organized in this way. So I think that there are aspects to this that when people are looking at what the threat is and what’s coming, there are places to plug. And we could cut things off, if we were only to do it in a more strategic way, as opposed to sort of just analyzing it. FASKIANOS: Thank you. We are at the end of our time. And I would ask each of you just to leave us with—and somebody put this in the chat, Zarrir Bhandara, that obviously religious leaders and clergy have a great responsibility. So what would you leave this group with as the top two things that they should be doing, or could be doing in their communities to help? MILLER-IDRISS: Oh, hard question in thirty seconds or so. But I would say helping people to understand how they’re being manipulated by the persuasive extremist tactics, propaganda, and rhetoric—whether that’s the weaponization of youth culture, the positioning of the far-right as the counterculture to a triggered mainstream that can’t take a joke—as we often see happening online—or the scapegoating of immigrants, or the ways in which in every—we’re seeing the mainstreaming of extremist ideas and the normalization of some of those ideas come across in many more spheres of life. So there’s no longer just a destination. And I think it’s on the obligation—it’s the obligation of everyone in the mainstream to build resilience to it. And that’s part of what it means to recognize that democracies are fragile, and that for a country that likes to think of itself as a beacon of democracy, it maybe is more of a shock to realize how fragile it is. But it’s all the more incumbent on all of us, I think, to understand that you can’t just defend democracy with force, but you have to do it with education. And that education starts in every community, including faith communities. So I think it’s on all of us to take this up in whatever small way we can. And it can feel overwhelming, and that you can’t do anything about it. But that’s the beauty of community-based resilience, is that every community can. So I think it’s actually an empowering moment for local communities to step up and really engage. FASKIANOS: Farah. PANDITH: So I would just say that—yeah—there are three things I would say. The first is solutions are available and affordable right now. And you cannot feel like putting your hands up in the air, like what are we doing to do? I realize you can’t boil the ocean, but to Cynthia’s point you need to start small in your local community, this is how it matters. Two, you must—must, must, must—put the pressure on elected leaders to put this into their framework as a priority. We have an obligation as members of a society to be able to build the kind of societies that we want. There are more of us than there are of the extremists. So let’s use that power and do more. And the third is, coalitions are our friend. And I think America has a great legacy of building coalitions to move things. And I think we are late to the game on hate and extremism. Everybody is fearful. We are a country that is a gun culture, so that—there’s an aspect of that as well, that if I go too far, I’ll be killed. There are requirements in terms of our own individual response to being an active actor in our community not to look away, and to do what we can do. So what Cynthia says about it takes all of us, that is my mantra. And I completely agree. Let us ask all of the members of community to put the red lines down on hate and extremism and build the communities that we want. FASKIANOS: Well, thank you both. We could go on for hours but, unfortunately, we can’t because of time. And we appreciate the time that you’ve given us today and the work that you’re doing in this space, and to all of you for your questions and comments. As I said, we will send out a link to the video, to the resources that Cynthia and Farah have mentioned. You can follow Farah on Twitter at @farah_pandith and Cynthia at @milleridriss. So I encourage you to sign up for their tweets. And I also hope you will follow us at Twitter at @CFR_Religion. And please reach out to us at [email protected] with any suggestions of topics that you would like us to cover going forward. We appreciate you both and all of you. So thank you very much. PANDITH: Thank you. MILLER-IDRISS: Thank you.

Michelle Gavin, senior fellow for Africa studies at CFR, discusses the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region and pathways to a resolution. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program. FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Social Justice and Foreign Policy webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. As a reminder, this webinar is on the record and the audio, video, and transcript will be made available on our website, CFR.org, and on our iTunes podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matter of policy. We are delighted to have Ambassador Michelle Gavin with us today to talk about the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. Michelle Gavin is currently senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She was formerly the managing director of the Africa Center, a multidisciplinary institution dedicated to increasing understanding of contemporary Africa. And prior to that she had a distinguished career in the government. From 2011 to 2014, Ambassador Gavin was the ambassador to Botswana and served concurrently as the U.S. representative to the Southern African Development Community. She also served, prior to that, as special assistant to President Obama and the senior director for Africa at the National Security Council. And before joining the Obama administration, Ambassador Gavin was an international affairs fellow and adjunct fellow for Africa at CFR. So, Michelle, thank you for being with us today. It would be great if you could provide us with an overview of the conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, and talk about what’s led up to it, and policy recommendations as you see what we can be doing here from the U.S. vantage point. GAVIN: Sure. Well, thank you so much for inviting me to join you today. And thanks to everyone who’s taking time to engage with this issue, which is one that genuinely does keep me up at night, and I think is keeping a lot of people up. So this is a conflict that broke out last November, but had, frankly, been a long time coming. The Ethiopian state had for decades been governed by a coalition, a coalition of political parties. But there was one group that was kind of first among equals, that was dominant in this ruling coalition. And that was the TPLF—the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. So the Tigrayans, which make up about 6 percent, more or less, of Ethiopia’s population—and there is—Ethiopia is a federation. So there are states demarcated on maps with different kind of local governments, and sometimes local defense forces as well. The Tigrayans had been kind of dominant federally until really the rise of the current prime minister of Ethiopia, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who is not Tigrayan. He is from—he’s an Oromo ethnically, although his background is mixed, which is true of many Ethiopians. It’s also a mixed religious background, interestingly. His father is Muslim, his mother an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian. He himself is Pentecostal. So as president—or, excuse me, Prime Minister Abiy assumes power, he had a kind of reform agenda, because any and all observers inside and outside Ethiopia agreed at that time the Ethiopian state wasn’t really working. There was a great deal of popular dissatisfaction with the federal government, with the center, a lot of political contestation. And so he unveiled a reform agenda, much of which was celebrated domestically and internationally, designed to open up political space in the country. But part of the reform involved eliminating some of the kind of preferences and the sort of first among equals role of the TPLF. So you had Tigrayans, senior Tigrayans who had long enjoyed very influential roles in politics but also in the economy and in the military finding some of that power being stripped away. And it set up a fairly antagonistic relationship. Now over time, the prime minister’s reform agenda stalled in some areas. There is still a great deal of discontent and contestation in Ethiopia, aside from in Tigray. But things really came to a head with the Tigrayans around the question of elections. So Ethiopia in June just completed elections. But those elections had been delayed. So the original election date was postponed because of COVID-19, and the difficulty of campaigning, of organizing in the midst of a pandemic. But the Tigrayans chose to go ahead with elections in their region, in defiance of federal authorities. And this really kind of set up a standoff.   And then, both sides were clearly mobilizing forces for actual conflict that the spark that lit the tinder was a preemptive attack on the part of Tigrayan forces on some federal forces in the area. And then what you had was a devastatingly costly conflict, where you ended up with four different armed groups in the mix in Tigray, and civilians suffering. You had the federal Ethiopian forces. You had the Tigrayan forces pushing back. But aligned with those federal forces, and very much complicating the picture, you had Eritrean forces who crossed the border to support Prime Minister Abiy in his campaign against the TPLF. And, worryingly, you had militia forces from Amhara, another very large ethnic group in the country who claim some of the land that on maps had been considered Tigray. So this devastating conflict, which has been accompanied by clear mass atrocities, the use of sexual violence as a weapon, refugees have been attacked, health care centers have been deliberately destroyed—which is a war crime—crops have been deliberately destroyed. And in fact, hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans are now living in famine conditions. People have begun to die because of famine. It’s a man-made famine in Tigray. So you have the conflict, you have atrocity crimes, and you have this devastating lack of food and access to health care. We’re almost there. We’re almost up to the present. But something very interesting happened last month, where essentially the Tigrayans, who more or less have been fighting as a guerrilla force, kind of—those who weren’t immediately killed or captured kind of melted away, regrouped in the mountains. The Tigrayans ended up reclaiming a great deal of territory from the federal forces. Federal forces then withdrew from the Tigrayan capital and from most of Tigray. And Prime Minister Abiy announced a unilateral ceasefire. It didn’t really meet—it didn’t look like what ceasefires usually look like, with arrangements for humanitarian access, et cetera. But there was this kind of inflection point in the conflict, where it appeared the Tigrayans had gained an upper hand, the Ethiopian federal forces withdrew. But the Tigrayans did not accept the ceasefire unconditionally. They wanted the Eritreans out. They wanted those Amhara militia out. Essentially the ceasefire is gone now. Fighting has resumed and has, in fact, spilled out of Tigray into a neighboring region, Afar. You’ve got now multiple ethnical militia from other Ethiopian states agreeing to join this fight against the Tigrayans. So a kind of balkanization of the Ethiopian state itself is very, very worrying. And you also have rhetoric that is really chillingly reminiscent of what we’ve seen proceeding genocides elsewhere in the world. So there’s a lot of dehumanizing language being used. Prime Minister Abiy recently made remarks that talked about getting rid of the weeds so as to save the crop, that we’re going to—and this kind of dehumanizing language around Tigrayans. Tigrayans who don’t live in Tigray, who might be in Addis, in the capital or elsewhere, are finding themselves targeted by law enforcement, their businesses shut down. It is an incredibly worrying domestic situation. And just to take a step back, it’s also worrying regionally. There is a border conflict now between Ethiopia and Sudan in the al-Fashaga region that could easily spin into an international war between these two states. All of this is taking place against the backdrop of extremely tense negotiations regarding the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the kind of signature infrastructure project of Ethiopia for many years, but that implicates Nile waters, relied upon also by Sudan and, most critically, by Egypt. And there’s been a lot of saber-rattling rhetoric about the inability to come to an agreement—a kind of rule-governed regime for the Nile waters in light of these—the Grand Renaissance Dam. You’ve got this Eritrean element, right, of Eritrean forces crossing the border, implicated in a number of mass atrocities, and a question about whether or not the Tigrayans would cross the border in retaliation. You have the fact that for many years Ethiopia was actually an exporter of security in the region. It provided peacekeeping troops in Somalia, in South Sudan. A lot of those troops have been recalled, right, to deal with the crisis at home, but this is just a fundamentally destabilizing situation in a country of over 110 million people. So if you think about what state collapse looked like in Syria, you know, this is a population about six times that size. So you can imagine the migratory flows, the tremendous human cost. And we’re seeing a terrible humanitarian crisis now. It could get much, much worse. OK. So what to do about it? Well, the international community has not been on the same page entirely about the crisis. It took a long time for the Security Council even to get this issue formally on the agenda because of resistance, particularly from China and Russia, and this idea that this is an internal affair of Ethiopia—which is slightly absurd given the Eritrean presence and the border conflict. But now the Security Council is able to talk about it, I think because everybody sees the dangers here. The Biden administration has elevated this issue. Clearly the president himself is engaged on it, the vice president, secretary of state. They’ve appointed for the first time a U.S. special envoy to the Horn of Africa, and experienced and extremely capable diplomat Jeff Feltman, who’s been engaged in diplomacy in the region, trying to draw some of all these disparate threads of these different, difficult issues together, and also to use some of his skill and expertise in the Gulf, because Gulf states are incredibly influential in the Horn of Africa, particularly the UAE, Saudi, and Qatar. So there have been targeted sanctions against individuals who have been deemed to be most responsible for the conflict. There’s been withholding of assistance—not humanitarian assistance, obviously, but critical development assistance. And there is—Ethiopia’s economy is not looking good, as most economies are not after the COVID-19 crisis that stalled so much of the global economy. And they have some real debt problems. And that means that the position of the international financial institutions is going to be incredibly important. The U.S. has significant influence there. So there are these leverage points to try to influence behavior, but to look at the rhetoric and read the news, thus far we’re on an escalatory trend, that the conflict and the crisis is moving in the wrong direction. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much, Michelle. That was a terrific and sobering overview. We’re going to go now to all of you for questions and comments. You can either raise your hand and I will recognize you, and please unmute yourself, or you can write a question in the Q&A box and share there. The first written question comes from Bruce Knotts, who is with the Unitarian Universalist Office at the United Nations.“I was a PCV near Gondar from 1972 to ’75. At that time it seemed to Tigray and Eritrea shared the same language and had some affinity vis-à-vis the Oromos and Amhara. How did they get to be enemies?” GAVIN: So this is a great question because it really, for me, kind of brings to the fore the importance of historical grievance in understanding some of the animating forces in this region. So it’s absolutely true that at one time the Eritreans and the Tigrayans had a very close relationship. But just as sometimes the best of friends a falling out then leads to the most bitter animosities, there was an incredibly bitter falling out. And the Ethiopian-Eritrean War in the late ’90s was—that war was prosecuted at a time when the TPLF was the dominant force in Ethiopia. Tigrayans probably made up the bulk of the Ethiopian forces who engaged Eritrean forces. And there has been tremendous bitterness and animosity between Ethiopia and Eritrea ever since—such that when Prime Minister Abiy was able to make peace with President Isaias of Eritrea, it led to a Nobel Prize. People were so excited at this idea of a rapprochement and a kind of more stable relationship between these neighboring states where there are such close family ties and personal ties across the border. But the nature of that relationship between the Eritrean state—which is one of the most authoritarian, restrictive, and abusive governments in the world—the nature of that relationship with the Ethiopian state now, as led by Prime Minister Abiy, you know, there’s a lens one can apply where this looks like an agreement essentially to go after the Tigrayans to seek revenge for past wrongs. And it’s become quite a toxic and concerning relationship. FASKIANOS: Great. There’s more of a comment than a question from Tsehaye Teferra, who is the founder, and president, and CEO of the Ethiopian Community Development Council. “There are people who think that the Trump administration had a hand in the war that is taking place now between Addis and Tigray. Do you want to comment on that? And maybe I could wrap with that, how is the Biden administration responding to this conflict now? And what do you see that they’re going to do?” I know you talked about the appointee and that, but, you know, go into a little more detail. GAVIN: Sure. Well, I’m certainly not aware of the Trump administration’s involvement—direct involvement in this conflict. I will say that there was some incredibly clumsy diplomacy around the GERD, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, during the Trump era, that appeared to side so blatantly with the Egyptians that I doubt it created a great deal of confidence in the United States’ sort of sensitivity to Ethiopian interests. But I don’t in any way believe that that’s kind of the animating force behind this conflict. I will say this, though, again, the TPLF was the dominant force in Ethiopia for a long time. And U.S.-Ethiopian relations have been complex but quite close for a long time. And so you do very much see in a lot of discourse now the notion that, well, the U.S. has always been on the Tigrayan side. They were with them before, as if—as if there’s some kind of affinity, essentially, between Washington and Tigray, which I don’t think is accurate but is, again, a great example of how history, right, very much informs the actions, opinions, and perceptions of people today. And I think that particularly as Americans we’re often not very sensitive to that, right? Sort of every day is a new day for us. Or we’ll say, well, that was the previous administration. That was two administrations ago. That’s now how people overseas see these things. (Laughs.) Right? America is America. And so I think that that’s an interesting point. The other thing I would say on this is that I think it’s important to note that the conflict in Tigray broke out the day after our elections in November. And so you’ll recall that the U.S. was very inwardly focused for quite some time after that, right, as we had a sort of period of tumult and uncertainty about the nature of our own transition. And I do think that that was incredibly unfortunate in terms of our ability to clearly seize on our interests in stability in the region and move out. Then you have a new administration that— any new administration, however well-intentioned—finds itself without the full team on the field, right? So it takes a while to get people confirmed in important roles. We still—there are very important posts in the Horn of Africa that are empty. There’s not a fully empowered ambassador in the chair. And that is a problem. It’s one reason why I’m so glad the Biden administration moved out to select a special envoy in Jeff Feltman, because that was a process that didn’t have to go through the regular confirmation process, which is a great thing about our system and also an incredibly time-consuming process. So what I think it’s taken the Biden administration some time because we’re all in the middle of a global pandemic and crisis. There are multiple foreign policy issues vying for attention. You don’t have people in the seats. But there has been, as I referenced, it’s notable. There is no African issue that has gotten the level of attention and the kind of high-level engagement that compares to what the Biden administration has devoted to this issue. I think, again, because the worst-case scenarios are so very, very bad. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I think Tsehaye has raised his hand, and so I’m going to just call on him to maybe expound or respond. And then we’ll go to Shaun Casey. And, Shaun, I know you wrote your question, but I’d love you to ask it yourself. TSFAYE: Thank you for the interest and also for convening this important subject. Dr. Gavin, I think you have said it correctly, the genesis of the war, when it started, how it started. You are absolutely right. There is confusion here following, you know, the narrative that have been given by the Ethiopian government. They want to stress that the war started on November 3 or 4. Actually, the war has been going on—not actual fighting, but the pre-war preparations have been going on almost for three years. As you may know, the Tigray region has been kind of quarantined. There were no access from Addis through Dessie. There was no access to Tigray from the Gondar area. So there was only one route, through the Amhara region. So these are all declarations of war by any imagination. So that is something that needed to be corrected, which people have now understood rightly that the war did not start on November 3rd or 4th. My comment earlier was, as you would recall, when the war started the then-assistant secretary for African affairs and the then-secretary of state, during the Trump administration, both basically blamed the Tigrayan regional government for starting the war. I am sure they know the facts, they had information through their embassy and many sources that the preparation for war had been going on for many years. But the irony is also they blamed the Tigray government for launching, you know, missiles to Eritrean. Therefore, you know, bringing Eritrean to the war, which was absolutely false. There are reports, there is information out there. Eritrea has been part of the preparation of the war against Tigray. And then, you know, they denied the presence of the Eritrean army in Tigray. The irony is at the time when the Eritreans were committing this horrendous terror in Axum—committing, you know, massacres in November in Axum—the State Department at that time was denying the presence of Eritreans in Ethiopia—I mean, in Tigray. So when you add all this together, it gives you the impression that—or, the speculation that the Trump administration, for some reasons, may have really the knowledge of what was going to happen. If so, the fact that they did not intervene to stop the war from happening gives the impression that they may have a kind of a tacit approval of the—of the war, and especially since the United Arab Emirate(s) is alleged also to have contributed. And the cozy relationship that the Emirates had with the Trump administration, you know, leads people to speculate, well, there must have been some involvement, even though it may not be practical, concrete, but there may have been some tacit understanding—and since Abiy promised that this war was going to be a short one and that was going to end, you know, in a few days. So I really would like you to comment on these issues. Thank you. GAVIN: Well, thank you for that perspective. I have to just be honest and say I’m not privy to what the Trump administration did or did not know. I’ve been out of government for some time. I can’t tell you what was coming across the transom in terms of information regarding plans, troop movements, et cetera. I can say this: I do think—and I don’t think this is unique to the Trump administration—I do think a lot of the international community was very invested in this idea of Prime Minister Abiy as a reformer who could see Ethiopia through a difficult set of kind of political questions and resolutions, and lead—and come out the other end with a kind of stronger, more just Ethiopian state. A lot of the kind of euphoria around Prime Minister Abiy, and even the Nobel Prize—which technically was about the peace with Eritrea, but I think was informed by this idea of the promise, right, of a more democratic, more representative Ethiopia, and what that could mean, and how exciting that prospect was. And I do think that there was a certain degree of investment in that idea that colored and shaped perceptions, particularly early on. I also think that you’re right about the outright falsehoods that the prime minister delivered publicly, right, regarding, you know, oh, this is a law enforcement operation, it’ll be just mopped right up. Or particularly the denial of the Eritrean troop presence for such a long time when it was crystal clear that the Eritreans were there. And I think that that—the loss of credibility that he suffered as a leader, because of those kinds of statements has been a significant factor in maybe some soul-searching and some readjusting of some of these perceptions, of some of this investment in an individual leader. I think many people, I would include myself among them, are still very invested in the idea of a strong and resilient, but representative and just, Ethiopia. And that—the promise of that, right, as a force for, you know, African leadership in the decades to come is—remains, you know, very compelling and exciting. Of course, we’re moving in completely the opposite direction right now. But I do think that there is always in foreign policymaking, there’s a degree of wishful thinking. There’s a degree of believing what we want to be true so much sometimes and investing in that idea. And it’s interesting from an analytical perspective, right, to think about what begins to break through and change people’s minds, and force them to reckon with the notion that maybe this vision that they’ve been very excited about is not actually the direction in which events are happening. FASKIANOS: Great. Shaun Casey, do you want to ask your question, or shall I read it? CASEY: Sure. I’ll jump in if that’s OK. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you, Shaun. CASEY: So you caught me in my official academic informal writing uniform. So I apologize. (Laughs.) But first of all, Ambassador, that was just a superb summary of incredibly complex history and set of contemporary details. So I thank you for that. Really three quick questions. I’m curious about the role of the Roman Catholic Cardinal Souraphiel there. There were some reports that Abiy had appointed him to a commission for rapprochement with Tigray I think before the fighting actually started. So it seemed like they had a personal relationship. And even though I think Catholics are about 2 percent of the population, it does seem interesting that as a Pope Francis appointee I think that they take a very deep interest in trying to stop the conflict there. I’m just curious if you have any insight into that ongoing relationship now that the fighting has started. Secondly, as you observed, in some ways Abiy is a parable of modern Ethiopia religiously. He’s got one parent that’s Muslim, one that’s Orthodox, and he himself is a Pentecostal. And that embodies some of the very unique and complicated religious dynamics there. Can you shed any light on the Full Gospel Church? It is a—it’s an international church. There are congregations in the United States of that denomination. And I understand they’re quite common across Africa. I’m wondering if there are any—if there’s any pressure coming on Abiy from his brother and sisters in the Full Gospel movement. And then finally, I have also heard that Abiy also wrote a doctoral dissertation on peacekeeping. And I’m curious if any—if there’s a way from the far reaches of Washington, D.C. that one might be able to actually locate that thesis, because inquiring academic nerds want to know what did he say? What kind of philosophical background does he have in his own academic work? GAVIN: Well, thank you for those incredibly well-informed questions. And I wish I had light to shed on the relationships. And I just have to be honest that I don’t. I’m distant and speculating based on what I see. I would say that voices of moral authority have taken some risks and been quite brave, particularly in speaking out against atrocities that have been committed over the course of this conflict, including voices from faith communities. And I think that that continues to be important. I also know from my own experience, my own contacts in the country, how difficult it is for people to speak freely and publicly right now. There is a great deal of fear that I think every individual’s kind of grappling with conscience, with risk, with what they actually think can make a difference. And I’m not in a position to judge the shadings of those calculations. I can only sympathize with how incredibly difficult it must be. I think I would love to read the thesis too. I think it would be fascinating. I do think we can see there are some pretty good indications of Prime Minister Abiy’s sort of overall philosophical outlook and how it’s informed by faith, both in the nature of the political movement he’s been building—the Prosperity Party, right, which right in the title gives you a sense of some of the kind of strains that he’s drawing on. And then he wrote a book, Medemer, about kind of the political philosophy that he espouses. So there are very accessible documents and sort of publicly available sort of places to kind of point ones academic lens to try and better understand sort of what the vision is here. But I will say this, even among people who spent time with these documents, I think a lot of people struggle right now—I certainly struggle—to understand the prime minister’s endgame in this. A country at war with itself, a situation where you’ve now empowered ethnically based armed groups to try and kind of get the work done as you see it, of the central government. And then you’re going to— the idea that these groups are then going to just kind of lay down arms and go back to a rule-governed process for dealing with their own grievances, and the fact that some of their aspirations are actually mutually exclusive, it’s very hard for me to understand what—how when he games these scenarios out in his mind, how this ends up in a place of a strong, and resilient, and prosperous Ethiopia. I don’t get it. And I have yet to encounter anyone who can sort of articulate what that sort of strategic plan might be. FASKIANOS: Shaun, do you have a follow-up comment? I don’t know if your raised hand is left over. And I should say that Shaun is with Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, and formerly of the State Department. CASEY: Sure. I’d just like to add one thing. I think one of the ironies here is that the first country I visited as special representative for religion and global affairs in the Kerry State Department was, in fact, Ethiopia in 2014. And, ironically, Ambassador Haslach, who was there at that point, we built up an amazing array of contacts for the embassy across all the major and even minor religious communities in Ethiopia. I have a suspicion that in the past four years that list and those robust relationships atrophied a good bit. But ironically, the embassy there was in fact equipped with a comprehensive list of contacts in religious groups. And they also maintained relationships with them. And so it really was quite a surprise, I think, when the conflict broke out, even who Abiy is. But I wonder if the embassy still has the kind of robust list relationships across the—you know, across Muslim communities, Orthodox communities, but also mainland Protestant and Pentecostal churches. I suspect that capacity is now defunct. And I’ll stop there. GAVIN: I hope you’re wrong. You’re probably right. But I hope you’re wrong. And I do—obviously you’re incredibly knowledgeable about Ethiopia. And I suspect many people in this conversation are as well. But for those who are maybe more generalists or are new to it, right, it is, I think, important to flag what an admirable society it is in so many ways, in its tremendous diversity, religious and otherwise, right, its complexity and its very proud history. So, also kind of in an earlier question there was this idea that there had been a moment when the U.S. might have been able to intervene to stop this war from happening. And it certainly would have been worth a try. I am not in any way suggesting that the U.S. shouldn’t have tried to do that and shouldn’t continue to try to deescalate the situation and stop the conflict. But I will say that Ethiopia’s never been a terribly easy state—(laughs)—to influence. And a perception, right, that the state could be bullied in any way, which is sort of the tenor and tone of some of the things the Trump administration tried, is a terrible misread, I think. So I’m not in any way suggesting that you were calling for that, or that anyone was. But I think it’s important to understand this is—this is not a country where a major development partner expresses an opinion and people hurry to accommodate it. That is not what this is about. FASKIANOS: Right. I’m going to go next to Azza Karam of Religions for Peace International. And, Azza, do you want to just ask your question? AZZA: Yes, with pleasure. Thank you very much, Irina. And thank you very much, Dr. Gavin, for a wonderful overview, and for the responses to the questions. I actually just wanted to elaborate a little bit more on whatever you know about the role of different religious leaders, institutions in this space so far. I mean, I think there has been such little reporting on what the religious communities are doing, and it kind of beggars belief because it’s a very religious society. We all know that. So where and how have religious leaders, religious institutions played a role, do you think? And what is your own read on some of that, if at all possible, would be much appreciated. Thank you so much. GAVIN: Well, thank you. And just to avoid misleading anyone, I’m not a doctor of anything. So I just—(laughs)—I don’t want to operate under false pretenses. Look, I wish that I knew more. I wish that I could point you toward a specific and detailed examples. And there have been—again, there have been some public moments of religious leaders expressing concern about human rights abuses. I suspect that there is a great deal more going on quietly, being channeled into channels that people believe might have influence. I very much hope that particularly the toxic turn the rhetoric has taken, some of the dehumanizing language I spoke about, will prompt even more people to stand up and suggest that this is not the direction anyone wants the country to go. But I think it’s also, maybe important to contextualize this a little bit in the nature of the kind of information environment that exists in Ethiopia right now, which is highly partisan. There’s a lot of “with us or against us” type of rhetoric on social media, in reporting. And this is—you see this on both sides of the kind of Tigrayan conflict, where you have—it’s not just the language that leadership is using, but the entire kind of information ecosystem. There’s not a lot of space for objectivity in any kind of reporting that Ethiopians are able to access. And there are very real debates about what even is the truth. Things that are not entirely unfamiliar to us but imagine a heightened and very intense level of this. And I think that that makes it hard too for upstanders, right, to break through. Essentially, people who speak to this issue very quickly get categorized—and so with us or against us. And I think that it’s all the more reason why voices of moral authority, including faith leaders, have such an important role to play in pulling this back from the brink. But it also—it’s a very hard task. It’s a very difficult environment in which to establish oneself as not being kind of a partisan in one way or another. And and it started with, very early on, a delegitimizing of the other that you saw between the federal government and the TPLF, where the delay in the overall elections did have the federal government standing, essentially, in kind of constitutional quicksand. And so you had Tigrayans saying, well, this is no longer a legitimate government. They don’t—their term has expired, right? You have the federal government has now formally classified the TPLF as a terrorist organization. It’s very hard to imagine political talks, but it’s also hard then to imagine people speaking out. You know, very quickly get accused, well, you’re a terrorist sympathizer. What is wrong with you? So it’s a—it’s a toxic environment that I think makes it difficult for all voices of moral authority to break through and be heard. FASKIANOS: Thank you. While we wait for more people to queue up with questions or comments, either by raising your hand or typing in the Q&A box, Michelle, you touched upon—we’re all experiencing this global pandemic. How specifically has COVID-19 affected Ethiopia and complicated, essentially, this situation? GAVIN: Sure. Well, it’s a sort of another layer of hardship, certainly. And the Ethiopian people, particularly in kind of the foreign policy circles, when Ethiopia came up for years, right, the first thing everybody thought about were these very impressive growth rates, which disguised, to some degree, the level of poverty that still exists in Ethiopia. So they were absolutely impressive growth rates, but inclusive growth is a harder thing to achieve, for any state. And you know, the global economic downturn has affected Ethiopia, as it has affected the rest of the world, but particularly African states. And so you’ve seen, losses of employment, less interest internationally in some of the privatization initiatives just because it hasn’t been a time for bullish investing, and obviously conflict doesn’t help. And the realities of COVID that led to a delay in the election cycle, right, very much contributed to an escalation in the tension between the Tigrayans and the center. Now, I tend to—I probably agree with one of the earlier questioners that the stage was set for conflict anyway, but perhaps that could have been delayed, perhaps there would have been more time for diplomacy and international actors to be helpful. Perhaps, you know, there’s a lot of what-ifs here. It certainly escalated and accelerated the friction and the drive toward conflict. So and still you have Ethiopians coping with the reality of insecurity, which does not only exist in Tigray, and not only in Tigray and now Afar, and not only in Tigray and at the border with Sudan. There are other parts of the country that are so consumed by political violence that elections weren’t possible there, or some parts of the country are operating essentially under martial law because of insecurity. So you have insecurity, then the additional layer of economic insecurity because of what COVID has done to the global economy, and then the disease itself, the disease itself, and for the entire region, the entire continent, more or less, the incredible frustration of not knowing when they will have adequate supplies of vaccine to feel more confident. So if you can imagine the sort of levels of despair and desperation, right, certainly COVID has had a great deal to do with that. FASKIANOS: Thank you. We have a written question from Bruce Knotts who asks if you could talk a little bit more about the refugee situation and its impact on Sudan. GAVIN: Sure. So you’ve had about sixty (thousand) to seventy thousand Tigrayans who fled across the border into Sudan. Sudan has been responsible in trying to receive these refugees, but Sudan itself—right?— is in the midst of this incredibly fragile transitional period where they ousted the authoritarian dictator, Bashir, and yet the military was not going to relinquish control of the state that they’ve enjoyed for such a long time, and so you have this tenuous military-civilian coalition governing that country. And what I think is important to seize on here is that that insecurity at the border with Ethiopia—not just the refugee flows but the border conflict in Fashaga, the GERD issues—all of this strengthens the hand of the military at the expense of the civilian coalition that protested in the streets in Khartoum and all across Sudan for a more accountable and more democratic state. Right? The more you can point to the threat at the border, the specter of insecurity and disarray, the more that empowers security actors. And so it’s entirely possible that the promise of a more democratic Sudan becomes a casualty of this terrible conflict in Ethiopia. I certainly hope not. We’re not there yet. But it’s a very worrying thing. The other thing to say about refugees is that quite a number; there were four different camps in Tigray of Eritrean refugees. And again, recall what an authoritarian state Eritrea is, and when the Eritrean forces crossed the border, it’s clear that refugees were targeted in some ways. Two camps were just completely overrun. You have new reports now of Eritrean refugees possibly being targeted by essentially all actors for their perceived loyalties—right?— because Eritreans are not terribly popular in Tigray right now, given the nature of what Eritrean forces have been up to, because Eritrean forces may see these refugees as traitors—reports of forcible repatriation and bringing some of these refugees right back to perform national service. So it’s a horrifying situation for a population that should be protected by international norms and has really been suffering and continues to suffer over the course of this crisis. And it’s important not to lose sight of that. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Syed Sayeed of Columbia University. If you could unmute yourself. Yeah, you still need to unmute yourself. OK. SAYEED: OK. Good afternoon. And it was very interesting to listen to both the presentations and the questions and comments. I’m wondering if there are any, you know, individuals, groups that have been active in peace-seeking rather than, you know, adding to the fire of the conflict. Are they still existing in any recognizable way or they have all just, you know, gone down? (Laughs.) I don’t want to use any words. So you know what I’m trying to get at, so please give your insight to see how we should perceive the present situation to develop in the future. Thank you. GAVIN: Sure. Well, I absolutely feel confident that there are groups inside and certainly in the vast diaspora community, which is often highly politicized but also perfectly able to come together to argue for a peaceful, kind of rule-governed process to deal with areas of disagreement. So yes, but, and here we come to the kind of—an information ecosystem that right now is not amplifying voices of moderation. Right? Those voices are getting shouted down very quickly, getting accused of being traitorous. And so I do think that kind of lifting up those voices when possible is something that kind of journalists, international civil society can be doing to try and create a little bit more space in the dialogue around this conflict for less kind of binary approaches. And where do I see this all going? I think international attention continues to be essential because the stakes for international peace and security are so very high. And so I think that certainly empowering Ethiopian voices who are calling for a de-escalation in conflict, a de-escalation in rhetoric, calling for a kind of national dialogue process ultimately to deal with some of the many, many simmering issues that have led to a great deal of conflict in Ethiopia’s recent past. Ethiopia, of course, just came out of elections that Prime Minister Abiy’s Prosperity Party won resoundingly, but those elections really don’t serve to answer these political questions; there’s got to be some other process going forward. And I do think it’s going to be important for the international community to make clear to all of the belligerents, all of them—right?—that there can be costs for choosing to prolong this conflict and then to try and work to create some guarantees so that no actor believes that a lasting and genuine cease-fire means certain slaughter—right?—or siege or catastrophes. There has to be some guarantees and some space but also some clear consequences to try and affect some of the strategic calculus going on because the—as you have more armed groups being brought into the mix, the prospects for accountability grow dimmer, the prospects for a negotiated solution grow dimmer because it’s that much more complex; you’ve got that many more actors in the mix. FASKIANOS: I’m going to try to sneak in one quick question from Ephraim Isaac of Princeton University. So, Ephraim, if you could be really quick. (Laughs.) There you go. ISAAC: Apropos the last question, yes, we have national peace organizations. I don’t want to ask a question or get involved in this issue because I chair the Ethiopian Peace and Development Center and we are for peace and love. In fact, in the beginning the prime minister followed a lot of the advice we gave about promoting peace and solving conflicts and promoting “inter-people” relationship. And our organization doesn’t work openly or in public; we are a national Ethiopian group. Recently, two weeks ago, we had a worldwide prayer day for peace in Ethiopia. It was sponsored by the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York. Participants were the archbishop of Sweden, president of the World Council of Churches, president of the All Africa churches, the Muslim leader of Nigeria, a Muslim leader from London, the archbishop from Bosnia, people—and then, of course, you mentioned Cardinal Souraphiel from Ethiopia participated, and also the Muslim leader from Ethiopia. We had about twenty people. By the way, the pope had also said a few things about Ethiopia and his message was also delivered. This happened two weeks ago. If anybody wants to listen to how the international community got together to pray for Ethiopia, you can go to Abyssinian Baptist Church Prayer Day for Ethiopia, and we worked very closely with all peace-seeking—we don’t believe that Ethiopian people are enemies. They are brothers. They are sisters. In fact, I’ll say the last word: We have no problem in terms of religion. I am a scholar of religion myself. Our problem is psychological—psychological. I know in New York two brothers who are trying to kill each other. I know a mother and a daughter who are fighting. So conflicts, really, we always simplify them by saying it’s ethnic conflict, religious conflict. No. They are psychological, whatever they are, even right here in the United States. So I’ll finish by simply saying we all have to learn a little more about religious ideas, peacemaking. Follow the teachings of the Prophet Isaiah, who three thousand years ago said day will come when the lion will lie with the cow, that nations will not raise arms against nations. (Speaks in a foreign language.) (Continues in English.) They will never kill again because the world is flooded with the knowledge of God. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Ephraim. Michelle, I will give you the last minute to sum up, or thirty seconds. GAVIN: Thank you to Ephraim who, you know, obviously, would be a great panelist, too, to talk to us about the work of his organization, his colleagues. I’m not surprised. Right? Ethiopian civil society has been suppressed actually for a long time and the tremendous resilience that they’ve shown in being able to organize and advocate for peace, for justice, for inclusive growth is phenomenal. There’s so much to admire so I don’t want to paint kind of Ethiopia as basket case. I am at the highest level of concern about this crisis and I think everyone else should be. But it is important to remember how very capable the Ethiopian people are and how much they have weathered in the past. So I’m very grateful for that final intervention and very grateful to everyone who’s taking time to learn more about this. I’ve learned more from you today as well. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much, Michelle Gavin. We appreciate your being with us. And to everybody’s questions and comments, this is really a rich discussion, so we appreciate your all taking the time to be with us. You can follow Ambassador Gavin’s work on our website, CFR.org, as well as CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy Program on Twitter at @CFR_Religion, and of course, go out—go to CFR.org for information and analysis on many other conflicts, regions, and issues here at home and around the globe. And do email us; you can send an email to [email protected], with suggestions of topics and speakers for future webinars and anything else you would like to raise with us. So thank you all for being with us. Enjoy the rest of the day and we look forward to reconvening soon.  

Dwight Bashir, director of outreach and policy, and Elizabeth K. Cassidy, director of research and policy, both of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), present findings and recommendations on religious freedom from the 2021 USCIRF annual report. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program. FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. As a reminder, today’s webinar is on the record, and the audio, video, and transcript will be made available on our website, cfr.org, and on our iTunes podcast channel “Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.  We’re delighted to have Dwight Bashir and Elizabeth Cassidy with us today to talk about the 2021 report on international religious freedom. Dwight Bashir is director of outreach and policy at USCIRF, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, where he oversees congressional communications and outreach efforts. While at USCIRF, Dr. Bashir has led or participated in numerous fact-finding mission internationally, has traveled widely throughout the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Before joining USCIRF, he worked with the United Nations and the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy on conflict prevention, with the U.S. Department of State advisory body on religious freedom and tolerance and reconciliation, and with the Baha’is of the United States and other non-governmental organizations advocating international human rights.  Elizabeth Cassidy is director of research and policy at USCIRF, where she oversees research and publications and development and promotion of USCIRF’s policy recommendations. She conducts periodic training sessions for officials from the State Department, Homeland Security, and Justice departments, and served on the State Department’s Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group in 2014 to 2015. And she’s also worked as a legal consultant to human rights NGOs in Namibia, and taught courses at the University of Namibia, and Princeton University, and Seton Hall University School of Law.  So Dwight and Elizabeth, thanks very much for being with us. You have just issued this report on religious freedom. It would be great if you could take us through your findings and recommendations. So Dwight, why don’t we first turn to you? BASHIR: Good afternoon. Thank you Irina, and thanks to the Council on Foreign Relations for providing this opportunity to discuss the Commission’s key findings and recommendations from our twenty-second annual report. The report, released just over a month ago, provides a snapshot of where religious freedom is improving or in danger, and what the U.S. government can do to encourage positive change. Key findings, recommendations, and analysis for each country chapter represent insights and information gained through numerous areas including use of hearings, fact-finding trips, research meetings with government officials, both in the U.S. and abroad, human rights advocates, and religious leaders. The annual report’s main focus is on two groups of countries those that USCIRF recommends the State Department designate as “countries of particular concern,” or “CPCs.” And those are these that USCIRF recommends the State Department place on a special watch list.  Under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which created us and the State Department office, CPCs are countries whose governments engage in or tolerate systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom. The special watch list is for countries where the violation is being two but not all three of the systematic ongoing, egregious tests for CPC status. This year, our report covers twenty-six countries based on 2020 conditions. We recommend fourteen of these countries for CPC status, and this includes the ten countries that the State Department has already designated as CPCs, most recently in December. These are Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. In addition, USCIRF believes that the State Department should designate four other countries as CPCs and those are India, Russia, Syria, and Vietnam. We recommend that the State Department maintain on the special watch list two countries, Cuba and Nicaragua, and add ten other countries to that list: Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.  Though the annual report focuses on the worst countries in the world for religious freedom, we also highlight improvements where appropriate, and we certainly saw some positive movement in some countries in 2020. This year, in fact, we determined that three countries, Bahrain, the Central African Republic, and Sudan, did not meet the high threshold for inclusion on the special watch list based on developments in 2020. However, religious freedom concerns remain in all three countries, and USCIRF will continue to closely monitor them on an ongoing basis. The cover of our report this year depicts the global reach of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has not only impacted the global economy, travel, and other sectors, but also international religious freedom. Across the world, public health measures to control the virus’s spread restricted in-person gatherings, including religious gatherings, and in many cases, but certainly not all, these measures comply with international human rights standards protecting freedom of religion and belief around the world. Such measures must be necessary to protect the legitimate state interest of preventing disease proportionate to meeting that aim, but must not be discriminatory, and must be lifted once the crisis has passed.  As I mentioned earlier, we were encouraged to see some improvements in some countries last year, and I want to spend a minute on Sudan. In Sudan, the transitional government that took power in 2019 took substantial steps towards ending severe violations. It also continues to closely engage with us and other international stakeholders in doing so. In February 2020, right before the pandemic hit us, I was part of a USCIRF delegation to Khartoum to assess conditions on the ground and to engage with the transitional leadership, including Prime Minister Hamdok and his cabinet. We were really encouraged by the evident progress at that time, as well as by further improvements as the year progressed. And most notably, in July, the transitional government adopted the Fundamental Rights and Freedoms Act which repealed the apostasy law, and did flogging for blasphemy, banned female genital mutilation, and permitted non-Muslims to drink alcohol, and abolish the guardianship law that required women to get a permit from a male guardian when traveling abroad with their children. We were also encouraged to see the continued prioritization of religious freedom and U.S. policy in the past year. In June of 2020, then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order on advancing international religious freedom, which more explicitly integrated the issue into U.S. diplomacy and development efforts. February 2020 marked the official launch of the International Religious Freedom of Belief Alliance, a network of like-minded countries committed to opposing religious persecution and advancing freedom of religion or belief for all.  Unfortunately, religious freedom violations in China, and the extension of its influence far beyond its borders represent possibly the most troubling development in 2020. The Chinese Communist Party’s increasing hostility towards religion has resulted in campaigns to Sinicize Islam, Tibetan Buddhism, and Christianity to rid them of alleged foreign influences in the Xinjiang region. The Communist Party’s campaign has translated into mass atrocities against Turkic Muslim minorities, and in particular the Uighur people. We were in full support of the State Department’s decision in January of this year to designate China’s treatment of Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang as genocide and crimes against humanity. However, our report also found that China’s growing overseas influence and activities also negatively affected religious freedom and other human rights far beyond its borders. The government exercises its broad economic and geopolitical influence to pressure foreign countries near and far to accept its demands without concern for human rights. Tactics include things like harassment, intimidation, and detention of human rights activists, ethnic and religious minorities, and other critics and dissidents. I’ll now turn the floor over to my colleague Elizabeth Cassidy to speak about our recommendations related to non-state actors, our victims database, and Religious Prisoners of Conscience project. Several other broader trends to be identified as immediate threats to religious freedom globally, and some key recommendations for the Biden administration. Elizabeth. CASSIDY : Thanks so much, Dwight, and thanks also to Irina and CFR for inviting us to come join this session today and also to everyone who’s participating. While the USCIRF annual report focuses primarily on the governments that have been the worst violators of religious freedom, we also highlight non-state actors who have engaged in religious persecution and violence. The annual report also covers what are called “entities of particular concern,” or “EPCs” under the International Religious Freedom Act. To qualify for designation as an EPC, a non-state group must commit systematic, ongoing, and egregious violation of religious freedom, and they must also exercise significant political power and territorial control the outside the control of a sovereign government and employ violence in pursuit of their objectives. This year, USCIRF recommended that the State Department re-designate seven entities as EPC, which the State Department most recently designated in December of 2020. They are Al-Shabab, Boko Haram, the Houthis, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, or ISGS, Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, or JNIM, and the Taliban. Although we remain concerned by particularly severe violations of religious freedom by other non-state groups, we concluded that they did not meet the statutory requirements of significant political power and territorial control in 2020.  During 2020, USCIRF has also continued to prioritize our Religious Prisoners of Conscience project,t or RPOC project, and through this project, we highlight individuals in prison for exercising their freedom of religion or belief, and USCIRF commissioners advocate and work for their release. Religious prisoners of conscience were directly and deeply impacted by the cross winds of COVID-19, which both exacerbated and highlighted the deplorable conditions of the prisons where far too many of them remain held. We remain deeply concerned about the health and safety of RPOCs as COVID continues to ravage prisons globally. At the same time, we were heartened by efforts in several countries to reduce prison populations for health reasons, which led to religious prisoners of conscience being released or placed under house arrest. USCIRF also has steadily been building and expanding our Freedom of Religion or Belief Victims List, or FoRB, Victims List. This list maintained on our website was mandated by the 2016 Frank Wolf International Religious Freedom Act. It now contains more than one thousand profiles of victims of religious persecution to help ensure they receive the public attention and focus that their cases deserve.  The 2021 USCIRF annual report also discussed key religious freedom trends around the world, which often take root or are born out in countries that do not meet the statutory criteria for designation as either CPCs or placement on the special watch list, the State Department special watch list. Dwight already spoke about one of those key trends, the long arm of China. Of course, the most prominent global trend and story in 2020 was the COVID-19 pandemic, governments took sweeping action to protect individuals and communities including imposing restrictions that impacted the practice of one’s religion and faith. Many of those restrictions fell under and are justified as public health exceptions defined in international law. But other restrictions, such as cutting off internet or cell service, had a draconian and dire impact on already vulnerable religious communities, including millions internally displaced or in refugee camps. The pandemic also unfortunately fostered an alarming wave of misinformation and intolerance targeting religious minorities, including anti-Semitism. Finally, in terms of U.S. policy, the Biden administration has committed to championing human rights, including freedom of religion or belief, and centering the safety and dignity of religious communities as foreign policy priorities. USCIRF has made specific recommendations in every chapter of our annual report to the Biden administration and to Congress to effectuate this commitment. Those recommendations include, for example, urging the administration to definitively and publicly conclude whether the atrocities committed and still ongoing against the Rohingya people by the Burmese military constitute genocide and crimes against humanity, and to act accordingly, as with the State Department’s recent determinations regarding China’s genocide and crimes against humanity against Uighur and other Turkic Muslims.  In February, USCIRF held a hearing on refugees fleeing religious persecution and examined ways in which the U.S. government could better support refugees and asylum seekers. Consistent with USCIRF recommendations, the Biden ministration announced in February its intent to increase the annual ceiling for refugees resettled to the United States from abroad for the current and upcoming fiscal years. It also indicated that it was considering creating several new priority categories for access to the resettlement program, including for certain severely persecuted religious groups. This would be a measure that USCIRF would welcome. We were encouraged that President Biden raised the ceiling for this fiscal year to 62,500, and we also welcomed President Biden’s executive order signed in February initiating a review of the expedited removal process, the implementation of what USCIRF has monitored under IRFA over the years, and has long found to inadequately protect asylum seekers.  Finally, it’s become abundantly clear in recent years how vital IRF leadership positions, International Religious Freedom leadership positions, are to the advancement of religious freedom as an essential human right. We urge the Biden administration to move promptly by nominating and appointing well-qualified individuals to key international religious freedom vacancies, and that the Senate quickly confirm those requiring confirmation. Those vacancies include the position of ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom at the State Department, the special advisor for IRF on the National Security Council staff, the special coordinator for Tibetan issues, and the special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. USCIRF also has stressed the importance of the administration providing them with the financial resources and staff needed to fulfill their mandates. Thank you. We’ll end our remarks there, and look forward to answering questions from the members of the group. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. That’s a great presentation. And we’ll go to all of you now for your questions. You can either raise your hand and ask a question, or you can type up your question, write your questions in the Q&A box. I already see that we have three or so. And if you’re on an iPad, you can click on the “More” button and you can raise your hand in that window. So I’m going to take the first question from, let’s see, Dr. Tarunjit Butalia of Religions for Peace: “I continue to be concerned about the rise of right-wing religious nationalism in South Asia, particularly in the largest democracy of the world, India. Could you kindly address why India was moved into the category of CPC?” CASSIDY: Sure, thank you. Thank you for that question. India was actually moved into the category of a CPC recommendation last year in USCIRF’s 2020 report and then we reiterated this, the CPC recommendation, again in the 2021 annual report. A key factor was the Citizenship Amendment Act, the discriminatory law that was enacted in 2019, providing preference to certain religious groups for citizenship. We also have long been concerned in India with issues of mob violence, where mobs act with impunity and target religious minorities, and legal structures that prohibit conversions or restrict conversions, and a worrying new development, there were several laws enacted during 2020 to restrict interfaith marriage, which resulted in numerous arrests during the year. Another concern expressed in the 2021 chapter was is the increasing repression of dissent, including those who spoke out against the Citizenship Amendment Act and its discrimination against Muslims, and those who otherwise advocated for minority rights or religious freedom. There also has been a tightening of the space for civil society organizations NGOs in India, including restrictions on foreign contributions, contributions from abroad, and the closing of human rights and religious humanitarian NGOs. FASKIANOS: Great. Okay, so next question comes from Victor. And people should raise their hand, to Victor Ghalib Begg, who is an author, philanthropist, and community leader: “My question is about respect for the holy spaces in Jerusalem, a city that holds a special place among the Abrahamic religions, especially in light of the recent attack on Al-Aqsa. What’s the position of the State Department such actions add to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia?” BASHIR: Thank you for that question. I can address that. First, I just want to specify that USCIRF, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, is separate from the State Department. So I can’t speak for the State Department, but I can reference you to the release of their report last month, as well. There was a question on this issue and of course, in effect, their response was such that, peace is vital because of the ongoing conflict, and so on, peace is vital to getting to respect for broader human rights and religious freedom. This is an issue we’ve tracked for many years, the situation there, things flare up at different times, we’ve seen a flare up recently, which is reprehensible to see people being denied, but at the same time, it’s extremely complicated security measures and concerns that factor in. But we certainly would like to see a movement here on the broader conflict because that, indeed, a lot of the data that we followed over the years demonstrates when there’s broader conflict, broader instability, extremism, that diminishes human rights protections, including religious freedom. So if we can’t address these broader pressing crises, then unfortunately, it’s going to be the human rights that are affected and are impacted severely. FASKIANOS : Thank you. Don Frew has written a question, but he’s also raised his hand. So Don, why don’t you just unmute yourself, say who you are, and ask your question. FREW: Hi, I’m Don Frew, with the United Religions Initiative, but also with the Covenant of the Goddess. So I’m curious, practitioners of Neo-Pagan witchcraft fall under the “witchcraft” category that’s currently illegal in many African and South Asian countries, where it’s often punishable by death. And I know from personal experience, that the Wiccan communities in such countries are very underground. Does USCIRF look at violence against accused witches in assessing a country or non-governmental entity? Is that included under religious rights? CASSIDY: Thanks, thanks for that question. I can start and then if you, Dwight, want to chime in. But the short answer is yes. Under a freedom of religion or belief, as protected under international standards, it’s an individual right to believe or not to believe as one’s conscience dictates. And very clearly under the international texts and interpretations, it applies to all beliefs. There’s not sort of distinctions made between quote unquote, “traditional beliefs” versus “non-traditional beliefs,” etc. Some countries do legally make those distinctions, but they’re problematic under the international standards. So we have reported on accusations of witchcraft or sorcery in different countries in our reporting, and I believe the State Department has as well. And there are reports over the years in different places, so absolutely, as long as people are peacefully practicing their own beliefs and exercising their conscience, it is protected. FASKIANOS: Thank you, let’s go to Karenna Gore, who has her hand raised. GORE: Hi, thank you so much for that wonderful presentation. Thank you to Irina and the Council on Foreign Relations as well. I’m Karenna Gore with the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, and my question is about indigenous peoples, and whether or not there’s consideration given to the sacred sites, which I’m particularly thinking of the Amazon. We know that, that 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity is in the hands of indigenous people. And in many cases, that’s the equivalent of a house of worship. And I know that you track non-state actors, as well as state actors. And I’m just wondering if there’s been consideration given to thinking about the religious freedom of these indigenous peoples, when their sacred sites are being decimated at such a fast rate? BASHIR: I’ll just hit on this and see if Elizabeth wants to go further. But yeah, that’s a very good question. And, and I want to also stress that freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or belief, we use these international standards in Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s a broad protection. So this is about those who believe in something or not belief, non-believers, but, of course, indigenous believers fit into that category. In fact, we’ve done  some research on, particularly in Africa, and we’re doing further research on some of the traditional indigenous religions. In some countries like Nigeria, there’s more of a focus on Muslims and Christians, but there’s a whole element there of indigenous faiths and folklore and other traditional beliefs. And this is not uncommon also in South America, like you’re seeing in Brazil there. So this certainly includes that we our mandate tends to focus on the most severe in terms of state actions or non-state actors that are violating religious freedom, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t elements here of other Indigenous beliefs all over the world that could be impacted, that, to be frank, that we may not be fully aware of or even aware at all, in some cases. So, a lot of our information is as good as we get through our civil society partners through travel in these countries. But if there is information that is dire or for that matter where there’s concerns about indigenous face, we would love to hear from that. FASKIANOS: Great, I’m going to go to Thomas Walsh next, who is with the Universal Peace Federation. His question is, “whether there’s a category for what might be called intra-religious violations of religious freedom, that is a violation within a particular religious tradition?” CASSIDY: That’s a great question. I wouldn’t say a separate category, but certainly those types of things absolutely could qualify as violations of religious freedom, and often do, because, of course, as I mentioned, religious freedom as a human right is an individual right. It’s also got collective aspects and protects the rights of people to come together in a group and worship, and protects the rights of religious communities to freely manage their affairs, but ultimately, it is also an individual right, which means that people have the right to dissent or choose not to follow the principles perhaps that a broader religious community does. So, where if someone, especially if the state is taking action against someone for following a different religion than that sort of approved or a different sector or denomination for that approved by the state, absolutely. Or if a non-state actor that violates on or meets the categories that we that we talked about of territorial control, and all of that, it would certainly rise to the level of our attention, but there are a lot of things that are happening that are also violations of religious freedom, even if they don’t hit that particularly severe level. So absolutely, there can be conduct within families, within religious communities, that absolutely is a violation of somebody else’s religious freedom. If it’s private parties, you then get into the question of, what is the state doing or not doing to protect that person, to punish the perpetrators, etc. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from Thomas Uthup, who is with Friends of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations: “Is it effective to persuade governments about the economic benefits of religious freedom?” BASHIR: I think that’s one of the most important arguments that can be made, frankly, and we’ve seen growing correlations at the very least, if not causations. But there’s been studies on that, started years ago by the Pew Foundation, but other work that’s been done to demonstrate that when you see countries that are protecting and adhering to human rights and religious freedom, freedom of religion and belief, there’s more prosperity, there’s economic benefits, there’s a lot of other connections there. But certainly, there’s many countries where segments of the population are deprived from contributing to their societies, because of that deep-seated discrimination or persecution. One that comes to mind is in Iran, the largest religious minority population there, the Baha’i community, who are seen as apostates, are effectively denied from contributing to many elements of society. And in the earlier days, when Baha’is had some modicum of freedom, they would contribute in many sectors and would be highly educated and so on. One example, India and Pakistan comes to mind, another community that’s so disadvantaged, but you start seeing that by depriving significant elements of your population, that impacts economic prosperity. So there’s some compelling arguments and some studies have been done that I think warrant that argument for sure. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Chloe Breyer has her hand raised.  BREYER: Yes, thank you so much for this very interesting, for the report this year, and my name is Chloe Breyer and I direct the Interfaith Center of New York. My question is about defamation and blasphemy. And just how I mean, so it’s a larger question, I guess, but how does USCIRF deal with an issue that often is used by majority traditions to silence dissent, either by other traditions or by dissenters within their own traditions? CASSIDY: Thanks, Chloe. that’s a great question, and it’s something that’s been a focus of USCIRF’s work for a long time, including a focus of my work for the fourteen years that I’ve been on the Commission’s staff. So blasphemy laws are a major issue and a major source of violations of both religious freedom and freedom of expression. And we’ve done extensive work on advocating against blasphemy laws over the years, including two major studies on that, the first one came out in 2017, and looked at the texts, analyzed the texts of the blasphemy laws and all the countries that we could find them in and sort of drew out the different ways that they violate international human rights principles. And then the second follow-up study, which was just released last year, looked at the enforcement of blasphemy laws in the eighty-four countries that have them, and the countries where they are most frequently enforced, of which there are about ten, and who are the most frequent victims, who are the most frequent perpetrators, what kind of cases are often involved. But you’re absolutely right, they are used as a means to both punished dissenters within, often within a majority faith that the state is protecting or enforcing, or used against religious minorities. They are also often a tool, false accusations can be used just simply for personal scores. So both in theory and in practice, really a source of severe human rights violations. FASKIANOS: Thank you, I’m going to take the next written question from Jonathan Golden, who’s at Drew University. His question is about import-export of religious conflicts. “We see conflicts for South Asia, Mideast playing, that’s a typo. Are these treated as one and the same? Or are they classified differently in freedom reports?” BASHIR: Well, I mean, if I understand the question correctly, I think it’s a question of how do conflicts from different parts of the world impact religious freedom, and that kind of gets back to what I alluded to earlier. Certainly, where you see ongoing conflicts, I mean, I think one that really stands for incentives in Afghanistan, where you see the U.S. is ramping up withdrawal there, and what are the implications for some of the minorities or the Shia Muslim population, Hindus, Sikhs, almost extinct in a country like Afghanistan, that the prospects of the Taliban coming to power in some regard. So by these types of groups who are being engaged with and this is an alarm bell for religious freedom and broader human rights, frankly, you see this in other parts, where extremist groups gain a foothold. And you hear about the non-state actors that we recommend that the State Department has designated, that have some kind of territorial control and are either fueling conflict, but it’s not limited to non-state actors, either. There are some situations there where, look what’s going on in Syria, northeast Syria, and there’s several parties to the conflict there, where religious freedom is severely impacted. So there is no doubt where there are ongoing armed conflicts, whether non-state actors or state actors are involved, this always has an impact on broader human rights, certain human rights protections, what some of the most vulnerable, in these circumstances are the religious and ethnic minorities who, like we saw in Iraq once Saddam was lifted from power and extremist groups started coming in and now we have the Iran-backed militias, still to this day, impacting some of the small: the Yazidis, the Christians (incomprehensible), in some of these small minorities who were living in relative freedom to some regard, even though that was a very tenuous situation. But yes, when conflict erupts, unfortunately, the most vulnerable will be impacted and it can have dire circumstances. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Mark Hetfield has his hand raised. HETFIELD: Thank you, Irina, and question for Elizabeth and Dwight, if they could quickly go over the findings of the Commission, or the recommendations of the Commission, with regard to refugees and asylum seekers and how this relates to the mandate of the Commission. CASSIDY: Sure, thanks. Thanks for the question, Mark, nice to have you on the line. So it relates in a couple of ways. The law that we mentioned, the International Religious Freedom Act, it does have a section on refugee and asylum provisions, recognizing that refugee resettlement, aiding refugees abroad is one way that the U.S. government can help the victims of religious persecution, among victims of the other forms of persecution that people are fleeing, so it’s been a longtime focus of the Commission’s work, and advocating for strong U.S. refugee resettlement program, which I alluded to in my opening remarks. Over many years, USCIRF has been a strong and a bipartisan, our commissioners are bipartisan from both parties, and we on the staff are nonpartisan, is a strong bipartisan support for that program. And also advocating for humanitarian aid abroad from the U.S. to displaced minorities. There’s a second aspect of USCIRF’s work related to refugee and asylum issues, that the law, the International Religious Freedom Act, authorized USCIRF to do a study of the expedited removal process, which is the summary removals that are done at the border, when somebody who’s not authorized to enter the United States arrives on whether the protections that are supposed to be built into that system for asylum seekers are actually being complied with. And in a number of studies over the years, including a major one that Mark worked on early on, USCIRF unfortunately has found that those protections are not being implemented, and made a number of recommendations to improve the quality of the interviewing processes. And so we’re hopeful that by demonstration as well as looking at that process, so we’re hopeful to see some improvements made as a result of the executive order that I mentioned in my remarks. FASKIANOS: Great. We’ll take the next written question from Majed Ashy at Merrimack College: “With COVID-19, or vaccinations in general, there have been conflicts between scientific findings and religious views. Is there a discussion of religious freedom when in conflict with science?” BASHIR: Interesting question. I mean, I’ll be very brief here. Maybe Elizabeth wants to jump in. But on this question, I would say that we look at it from the question of is there freedom of religion or belief, our governments using the pretext of COVID-19 and trying to, for public health reasons, because there are exceptions, as Elizabeth alluded to, to limit religious freedom? That’s what we look at. We did see some examples where they punished groups, like a group that’s being accused of starting COVID-19. And we saw some things happen in South Korea with a small minority there, as well as Sri Lanka, a lot of misinformation flying around. But as far as the science, we don’t really get into that aspect. But certainly, there have been some examples, and we document those in our report where some countries have used the pretext to crack down on disfavored minorities and disfavored dissidents as well. FASKIANOS: Okay, great. I’m going to go to Bani Dugal of the Baha’i International Community:  “Thank you for this excellent presentation. USCIRF sometimes visit to New York during UNGA in September, which is UN General Assembly, do you plan to visit this year? And particularly, any plans for some event?” I think this is the million-dollar question for all of us, as to what’s happening in September, as we’re opening up. But do you want to preliminarily say any thinking? BASHIR: I mean, I’m happy to just jump in quick, I think that’s a question in the arenas that we’re all looking at. We’re looking at transitioning ourselves that we - one thing I would like to highlight is our work this past year, really, for fifteen months, as many of you have, has been remote, we haven’t been able to travel, to do the fact-finding missions, but we find other ways. We’ve actually ramped up our public activity in terms of hearings and events and various kinds of - we started a podcast last year, we touch on four issues, freedom of religion or belief issues in countries, and dramatic concerns around the world. But at this point, I think it’s a little preliminary to know to what extent we’ll be able to get to some of this in person. I mean, obviously it’s easier to travel domestically right now, but I can tell you that we’re itching to get back out there and to engage in person, we were talking before the event today, I think we missed the kind of discussions on the margin rather than kind of in the settings where you can have a discussion in front of larger audiences. But you missed the after events from before. So hopefully, we get back to that. But at this point, we don’t have any immediate plans to be there at this time in person. FASKIANOS: Great. Dr. Butalia has another question, while we stand by for others: “It seems that some democracies across the world are getting better at limiting religious freedom for minorities for political motivations. Do you see any patterns here? And if so, what can the U.S. government do about it?” CASSIDY: I can start on that one, and then Dwight can chime in if you’d like. It’s a great question. I think yes. There are often political considerations that come in some of these things, I mean, ultimately, for us, we’re looking at the violation, the impact, so whether it’s, the motivation, may be less important. But certainly we do see governments where sort of religious nationalism has become kind of a political issue, and government officials are campaigning and speaking and taking actions to sort of favor and get the support of a particular religious community, often the majority religious community, which can play out in ways to the detriment of minority faiths. FASKIANOS: Thank you, I’m going to go to Ani Zonneveld, from Muslims for Progressive Values: “The EU has a trade policy that ties priorities of trade with states that adhere to international human rights norms. Is this a possibility for the U.S., and it’s something USCIRF is thinking about and advocating for?” BASHIR: That’s a really good question, Ani, thank you for asking that. And I’ll use that opportunity to talk about a few broad tools that do exist as far as kind of punitive measures as such, is really what that is saying, if you don’t respect human rights and religious freedom, it’ll impact trade or economic aid, and so on. And we have over the years made recommendations, I think, on this issue. In fact, we held some hearings this past year on looking at this aspect in the China situation, what’s going on in Xinjiang with the Uighurs. And we started seeing that U.S. companies in the supply chain are actually in effect, aiding and abetting some of what the Chinese are doing with surveillance and certain materials that they’re providing, and kind of really put a spotlight on this, to demonstrate that, hey, we’ve got a significant relationship with China, significant trade and so on. But, to get a free pass on this is reprehensible if it’s at the expense of a whole significant population.  We’ve also looked at the issue of the potential of conditioning aid, that’s a bit of a sensitive area, because many countries that need humanitarian aid is one thing, but there also is economic support there that we give to a lot of countries, for example, Egypt and Pakistan come to mind right away, where there are significant religious freedom concerns. So we have made recommendations along those lines, we also have made recommendations, we’ve seen many implemented on the use of targeted sanctions under the global Magnitsky law, as well as other tools, executive orders that exist when there are violations. And we saw both the previous administration already, the Biden administration, and this is not that new, because even during the Obama administration, before that, when these things started coming into play, there was some activity there, but this didn’t affect our travel bans and asset freezes on officials who are involved in severe violations. So it’s an important question, I think that trade is only one element of what in effect the consequences, but this gets to the other element, which I’ll just touch on, maybe Elizabeth wants to expand on is the issue of waivers. When a country’s named a CPC, they’re almost I think, more than half now have waivers of any action, including Nigeria, the latest. So in effect, you’re saying, hey, they have severe violations, but there are no consequences, economic or otherwise. And I think that sends the wrong message. Elizabeth, do you want to follow up? CASSIDY: Yeah, just to build on that. That’s a great question. As you know, one of the tools that the U.S. government has under the International Religious Freedom Act is these designations, these “Countries of Particular Concern” designations, but five of the ten that are currently designated have these waivers in the interest of national security. So the whole point of IRFA was that this designation came with some sort of action. And that it was meant to, that that action was meant to sort of encourage the country to make changes. And right now, there are mostly waivers or equal to waivers, and something including countries such as Pakistan and Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. So we’ve called for the U.S. to take some sort of unique policy action, including there’s a tool in the law that’s really been underused, what’s referred to as a “binding agreement” where the U.S. should negotiate an agreement with this country. And we’ve often urged that it could involve some aid, that in exchange for this aid on these certain issues, the government would agree, say the government of Pakistan or the government of Nigeria would agree to take certain actions to address the violations. So while we welcome the fact that in recent years, there have been a number of countries that the State Department has added to their CPC list, which is an improvement. There was a long period of time under the existence of IRFA, where it was just static, none added, none taken away. The naming of those countries isn’t necessarily going to be enough, especially once they’ve been named once before, the naming isn’t necessarily going to be enough to encourage the country to take the actions that the government needs to take to address the problems. OPERATOR: As a reminder, to ask a question, please click on the raise hand icon on your Zoom window. When you are called on to speak, please accept the “unmute now” button, then proceed with your name, affiliation, and question. You may also submit a written question via the Q&A icon on your Zoom window at any time. Thank you. FASKIANOS: Great. Chloe Breyer has a follow up question: “Can you talk specifically about the Uighurs in China, pressuring UAE and other countries to abduct the Uighurs and force them to China?” CASSIDY: Yeah, I can start on that. That is absolutely a problem that we’ve seen in a number of countries. As Dwight mentioned, one of the trends we highlighted in the report this year was the transnational repression that China is engaged in, and its effect on religious freedom. But one of the manifestations of that has been mostly related around Uighur issues, but not only in China pressuring other governments to either send Uighurs back to China, which of course, sends them to a situation of persecution or torture in violation of international law and commitments under the Refugee Convention. But also to pressure countries at the UN not to sign on to statements criticizing, condemning the Chinese government for its policies related to religious freedom and its repression of Uighurs and other communities. So it really is a huge problem, I mean, it’s something a number of governments are aware of, and, obviously, there’s been a significant uptick of the U.S. and other like-minded countries taking action against China for these human rights violations, including targeted sanctions of the types that Dwight referred on Chinese officials, some specific to religious freedom violations, and in particular, sanctions coordinated with allies, which are very effective way of doing that. So it’s a good question and a big problem. BASHIR: Let me just add to that briefly, if you don’t mind, because I think what she was also getting to in referencing the UAE is countries that selectively advocate for the rights of Muslims or other ethnic religious groups. It’s been really disappointing to see the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, that the organization that has some fifty-odd countries, predominantly Muslim countries in the world that has not taken a stand on this issue. And it has on some other selective issues, or individual governments who have said they’ve gone, a couple that come to mind are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia’s leaders there that traveled, oh, well, we saw everything’s fine. It’s really ludicrous that leaders of other countries in the region that have an opportunity to speak out are silent. I mean, the reality is China has its tentacles, including economic, security, and otherwise in so many countries around the world and is expanding. We really talk about that long reach because it has dire consequences. But the evidence is clear. I mean, we know we’re doing something right, because two of our commissioners, our chair and vice chair this past spring were sanctioned by the Chinese government. In fact, Secretary of State Blinken made a statement about that response because, as Elizabeth was alluding to, there were sanctions coordinated with several countries in Europe and Canada that issued sanctions along these lines for what’s going on in Xinjiang, and in response, they sanction two commissioners, and then a former commissioner was also just sanctioned a week and a half ago who had spoken out. So it’s getting more complicated because they’re aggressive, they’re willing to respond tit-for-tat, but in the end, it’s that truth to power issue there. If you’re going to be silent, if you’re going to take a pass on this, history will be clear down the line, those who are speaking out. We hear a lot from the Uighur community, one of our commissioners, Nury Turkel, is the first Uighur-American on the Commission funded by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He’s been advocating his lifetime, you see people who appreciate the victims, so we’re not going to stop, and even when there are repercussions, as is the reality here, but it is disappointing that other governments that could speak out have not. FASKIANOS: Thank you, let’s go to Azza Karam.  KARAM: Thank you very much indeed, I very much enjoyed and learned a lot from Dwight and Elizabeth, and Dwight, hats off to you for making that last comment, which I completely support you on. I think you were being very diplomatic there. It’s actually downright shameful how some of the so-called Islamic countries or Muslim-majority countries have been noticeably silent. It’s reprehensible on every single level. I do have a question for both of you, however, and please feel free to address it not necessarily with the USCIRF official hat on, but from your respective experiences. I often find that there may well be, but it’s a question, there may well be a value added to all religious leaders from different religious institutions around the world. Actually speaking as one about this, about certain issues of religious freedom violations, especially, though not only on this Uighur situation, but also quite frankly, on a number of others. But I’m ever curious about the fact that it rarely ever gets the time of day in media. If one particular religious leader His Holiness Pope Francis to speak, that definitely gets covered, but when all hundred of them speak, it rarely gets any attention. So I have-my question is twofold. Do you find in your own work, that such statements where all faith leaders, prominent faith leaders representing their institutions, come together and speak as one openly against different kinds of violations? Is it a value to your work? And it is, do you see any particular value added to the more youthful religious leaders coming together to speak about certain religious violations? Does it make a difference? If it’s the elderly, or the formal representatives, or if it’s the younger ones? I’m just curious as to your own take on this, given your respective experiences. Thank you so much. And thank you, Irina, again, for another stellar communion. CASSIDY: I can start on that and then Dwight’s been with the Commission even longer than I have, so we’ll let him let him think about it. But I do think it’s been helpful when there have been examples of that. I mean, particularly, obviously, inherent in religious freedom is this sort of assumption that there are religious differences. That’s part of the point. That’s why you need religious freedom. I mean, the people of different faiths, I mean, different people are not going to agree on everything. But I think, especially in the face of some of the egregious, the most egregious and most violent violations, it is helpful where there have been religious leaders who have come together, the Faith for Rights initiative, for example, to speak about how the principles inherent in international human rights norms are shared, amongst a number of other faiths and consistent with a number of those faiths because sometimes you do find, typically from the more repressive governments, claims that the human rights principles don’t represent their religion or their culture, and that there should be these exceptions carved out so, and I think it’s a really good question too, that your sort of second part about sort of the different generations of leaders. And I mean, my personal view is sort of as many as many voices from different ages, genders, backgrounds is helpful. I mean, and we try to when we’re interacting with both religious and civil society groups, make sure we’re hearing from a range of people. Because you’re right, in some contexts, it tends to be sort of older men who are in the leadership positions of some of these traditions and organizations, and they may not have the only perspective that we should be hearing from. BASHIR: I’ll just jump on that because I have a similar perspective, but a little bit different take because I do believe it’s important that coalitions come together from various faiths and those who have no faith. Frankly, when you see things like the Marrakesh Declaration in Morocco, where a group of predominately Muslim leaders, religious and political, came together to say we want to ensure going back to the early days of Muhammad protecting the rights of non-Muslim minorities, that’s important when the Pope goes to the UAE and meets with the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar in Egypt, that’s very positive. But I will say this, I mean, in some circles that I’ve been in over these nearly twenty years on this issue, there are certain circles when people are identified as “people of the Book,” so to speak, and that includes Muslims, Christians, and Jews, others sometimes fall short. I think it’s important to be overly inclusive here. There are younger religions, there’s always the issue of what is a religion? What is a faith community? What is spiritual movement? There’s all that, you can get into all these academic definitions. In the end, it’s about individuals speaking out collectively. And when you have universal standards as a benchmark, that’s important, because these have been hammered out over the decades, over the years, there’s got to be something there to refer to. So when you do have religious leaders, and I would say, let’s try to build on that, let’s make sure there’s non-traditional faces, let’s make sure there’s women, female leaders among these religions, part of this Elizabeth referred to, very important to send a message is that we’re talking about full inclusivity here. So that would just be my own two cents. My personal views on that one. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question, and it’s probably going to be the last question, from Satpal Singh from SUNY Buffalo: “Very often the role of influential countries like the United States against human rights violations and other countries as needed by their own trade and economic priorities. Are there any hopes of getting a better coordination on this issue among countries that care about human rights?” CASSIDY: It’s a great question and an issue not just for the U.S., but for a lot of other countries that both care about human rights and obviously have trade, security, economic interests with countries that don’t uphold the human rights principles. I think there is room for more international collaboration on these sort of things. I think what both Dwight and I have talked about the situation with China and how we’re seeing increasing sort of coordinated effort, I think hopefully those will continue, obviously, China is one of the most egregious situations in the current time, but certainly not the only situation where there are real concerns. But this is always the tough question, and we at USCIRF have an easier job in some ways than our colleagues at the State Department and within the administration and other governments. Our mandate is to look purely at the religious freedom situation, and to make the recommendations that we think are warranted without having to take into account those, we know that those other things exist, and that’s why USCIRF was created, meant to be the voice on the human rights issue. But the reality is that the human rights issues do sometimes get outweighed by other concerns, but it won’t stop us from continuing to make those recommendations and to push those things, to try to get the U.S. to sort of think of creative ways where it can uphold its values, while also maintaining the relationships with those other countries. FASKIANOS: Dwight, you get the last word. BASHIR: I would just say, I actually just want to thank you, these are great questions. We appreciate this, feel free to be in touch with us. We want to encourage those of you who have constituencies or connections with folks around the world, I mean, we’re only as good as those who feed into our calculations on things but we really do pride ourselves in our work, objectivity, and integrity of our research and an information that we gather. So we appreciate these excellent questions, and I really look forward to hearing from you. Thanks so much. CASSIDY: And if you haven’t already, please sign up, check out our website, you can watch our events and get our mailings and our reports and follow our work. FASKIANOS: Great. Well, thank you Dwight Bashir and Elizabeth Cassidy for this presentation, of course, your report, which I know we all look forward to, and you can follow them. @USCIRF is the Commission’s Twitter handle, and you can also follow Dwight @DwightBashir and Elizabeth @EKCassidy. So, go there. You can follow CFR Religion and Foreign Policy on Twitter @CFR_Religion. And also, as always, please reach out to us, email [email protected] with suggestions on future webinars or events. We look forward to hearing from you. My apologies for all the good questions that came through in the chat or the Q&A box. I’m sorry, we couldn’t get to them. But they’re fodder for future conversations. So thank you all and have a wonderful day. 

Joan Donovan, research director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, and Ed Stetzer, executive director of Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center, discuss the spread of disinformation in faith communities. This meeting is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program. FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. As a reminder, today’s webinar is on the record. The audio, transcript, and video will be available on our website, CFR.org, and on our iTunes podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. So we are delighted to have with us today Joan Donovan and Ed Stetzer, to talk about disinformation and faith communities. I’ll just give a few highlights of their distinguished backgrounds. Joan Donovan is a research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, where she leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns. Her research and teaching interests are focused on media manipulation, and she has been showcased in a wide array of media outlets, including NPR, The Washington Post, New York Times, among others. Prior to joining the Harvard Kennedy School, she was a research lead for Data and Society’s media manipulation initiative, where she led a large team of researchers studying efforts to manipulate sociotechnical systems for political gain.    Ed Stetzer is the dean [of the School of Mission, Ministry, and Leadership] at Wheaton College, and he also serves as executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center. He’s a teaching pastor at High Point Church in Chicago, and has been the interim teaching pastor of Moody Church in downtown Chicago. He’s written many books, hundreds of articles, planted, revitalized, and pastored churches, and trained pastors, contributing editor for Christianity Today. He is the founding editor of The Gospel Project, a curriculum used by more than 1.7 million individuals each week for bible study. And he has a national radio show “Ed Stetzer Live” that airs Saturdays across the country. So welcome, both.   Thank you very much for being with us for this important conversation.  Ed, let’s begin with you to talk about why religious communities are particularly vulnerable to the spread of disinformation. So over to you.   STETZER:  Happy to do so. And I guess I, by the bio, you can obviously tell I’m not just an observer, but I’m a participant in my religious tradition, Evangelicalism in particular, and the reality is Evangelicals have a problem. Now, it’s not just an Evangelical religious tradition, but that they have been disproportionately impacted in and around issues of conspiracy theories. So I actually, I’ll be talking about this today, I’m at a gathering of religious leaders here right now who asked me to address this issue. So I actually now do conferences and webinars, helping denominations and religious leaders walk through and help their communities engage some of these conspiracies and conspiracy issues. This is actually the title slide from that presentation. And you’ll notice I use some a bit of insider language, but I want to let you know my own context here.   So conspiracy theories, media habits, and the challenge of digital discipleship, that last few words insider language, so things that Evangelicals, and people of faith, of other Christian traditions use to describe some intentional change that’s needed. Let me tell you where I began to weigh into some of this conversation. It was actually in an article in USA Today. And Evangelicals need to address the QAnoners in our midst. And I wrote in there QAnon has been making headlines, but Evangelical Christians should not be swept up into the bizarre movement. Now, if you’ll notice the date is actually September 2020. And the first headline, the first line of the of the story, QAnon, in my editorial, QAnon has been making headlines in recent weeks, it’s going to make more, I received substantive pushback from this article. And people say no, this is not an issue. Of course, on January 6, the world saw there was an issue. And when the rioters prayed on the floor of both the House and the Senate, in Jesus name, with Evangelical language and with Evangelical feel, I think people began to realize indeed, just how big of an issue this actually was. So what I want to walk through with you is a bit of some research we’ve done, and a little bit of background, not too much, but a little bit of background, particularly focusing on “Q” and QAnon, and hopefully this will find helpful, you’ll find this helpful as well.   So in fall 2017, we begin, conspiracy theories have been around a long time. Chain letters go back a very long time. But technology has accelerated, and brought people together, and found more engagement in and around this issue. So if you’ll notice, here at fall 2017, let’s make sure I’m sharing the correct screen. I’m not sure I was there. Let me just make sure I am now, now I am. So in fall 2017 Q emerges, begins, I won’t go into too much details what’s called a Q drop. October 28, 2017, very much connected to the Trump administration. And I would also say that the Trump administration’s particularly high connection to white Evangelicalism actually is evident in some of this data as well. But Q claimed an impending storm was going to come. And what happened very soon is, is that events were interpreted in light of this coming storm, there’s a deep state conspiracy. Most of us are aware of these things, such as sex trafficking, global election fraud, and more. Every event, though, was soon interpreted through this lens, this two part lens of evil, global conspiracy, and an impending, impending but unexpected victory that’s often called the “Great Awakening.” So QAnon beliefs and commitments include, and again, this is a bit theological and historical, but a gnostic framework of knowledge, authority, and power, with some special knowledge that people have and share, and they share in their communities and their chat rooms, but also a cosmic binary of good versus evil. The populist suspicion of traditional government institutions, media, and corporations, and a nationalistic lens of history, political authority, and cultural power. Well, if you look at those two middle points in particular, those are already existing in Evangelicalism. And they’re existing in many religious traditions. And what I want you to hear is that QAnon, and some conspiracies, travel well on the tracks that religion has already laid. Now, again, you heard from the very beginning, I am a coreligionist, I am an Evangelical, I really do believe that there is indeed a behind-the-scenes spiritual battle between good and evil. I really do believe indeed, that there will come a time when there will be a great revealing of all things. So the language is actually so similar to Evangelical and religious language, who may be already suspicious of media and more, I’ll show you some data that points to that in a minute.   So Q encourages followers to look for clues, to kind of see. There was, it actually blew up on Wayfair was a perfect example of people begin to look for clues and find the clues, which I will tell you, religious people like me, actually will sometimes think and act that way in general to see, well, how is God at work here? We’ve seen God work in our lives. And so this is kind of laid on some of the tracks that are there. So the question is, how prevalent are they in the church? Now remind, I want to remind you that my audience is not normally the Council on Foreign Relations. My audience is my coreligionists. So when I wrote that article in September, trying to sound the alarm, I think people may be were as engaged or as aware had how significant the prevalence was. But we actually did a survey, that I’m going to share with you, that kind of unpacks some of these things. But I know that sometimes these memes probably seem silly to you. The meme here on the left, and I will tell you, it seems silly to me. But there’s a subtle way to capitalize on Christian language to attract Christians or people of other faiths, right. I’ve talked to Muslim imams who have similar experiences as well. There are scripture verses talking about war, and the challenge of the Christian life, and then they get reoriented. And it’s easy to take certain passages, which I won’t for the sake of time go to. So a couple things that are key: the spiritual terms, so QAnon and similar conspiracy theories, have actually demonstrated ability to subvert classical Evangelical language.    Now, I want to say to you, this is really important, that QAnon is a substantial influence in France that is not tied to religion, in the same way that it’s tied here in the U.S., which has a disproportionate Evangelical population, depending on how you count a third of Americans. And so there is more to it than religion. But that’s our topic today. And certainly, as to my coreligionists, I share that concern as well. Even language like the “Great Awakening” is actually language that’s very much taken from Christian religious history. And more. So many Evangelicals recognize this language, I actually take people through a museum at the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, and I show them the First Great Awakening, and the Second Great Awakening. So many of this says, trust the plan, there’s a Great Awakening coming, and more. So this can lower the fence of many Christians who also are already suspicious of mainstream media, as they might call it, and more.   Let me, so you might see some memes like this, “where we go one, where we go all,” that’s language that actually when I wrote the article in USA Today on conspiracy theories, I used the hashtag “where we go one, where we go all,” which I can assure you certainly alerted people to the article and led to much enthusiastic response but this idea of, “don’t tread on me, don’t mess with us.” So real quickly, and then I’ll close, half of U.S. Protestant pastors, in a survey that we did, hear conspiracy theories in their churches. Around one in eight strongly agree their congregations, or congregants are sharing conspiracy theories. We’ve defined it using Merriam-Webster here. So this is a widespread issue among congregations as well. They hear these things on a consistent basis. More larger churches are more likely to hear, older churches are more likely to hear as well. And I think one of the things we’ve got to remember is that people who are Evangelical, already have a suspicion, that the Trump administration tapped into and QAnon tapped into, and others, they already have a substantive suspicion, you’ll see non-Evangelical in yellow, Evangelical by belief, I won’t explain all that, but it’s a series of four things called the Bebbington Quadrilateral. They have a higher belief that the mainstream media puts out a lot of fake news. So we step into a situation where QAnon uses religious language, has engaged different people. When I explain to Christian pastors and leaders, I talk about different kinds of them. Some are attracted, some are advocates, some are apostles of these conspiracy theories, I won’t unpack that with you, because my time is up. But what I want you to hear is that conspiracy theories run on the tracks that religion has already laid. Furthermore, there’s already a suspicion of mainstream media, and some of these people have now found one another in echo chambers, we might say, dark corners of the internet, they’re not that dark. The most likely place somebody planned to participate in the January 6 riots was on Facebook. And it was part of what got banned, but it was Facebook, where these things were planned on private Facebook groups, where people get in echo chambers and get even self-radicalized. For me, I’m trying to teach pastors and Christian leaders how to address and how to engage this. I know many of you come from different traditions, some of you are religious scholars, I want you to hear, I think this is a big, substantial issue that still remains for us to address thanks for the opportunity to share with you.   FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. And I hope we can dig even deeper on that. But first, let’s go to Joan to maybe react to some of that and talk about disinformation and how you see it circulating among and within communities.   DONOVAN: Well, thank you so much, Pastor, I really appreciate the context setting because this is something that’s, as you know, hard to prove. But it’s all around us. It’s become part of the culture. And one of the things that as a research director at Shorenstein is, people know disinformation exists. And then when you say, well, it’s actually really intertwined with a history that we know very well, which is a history of conspiracies, and the way in which different communities pick them up. And, then people are like, yeah, yeah, but those people are crazy. And I’m like, those people are your family, they’re your neighbors, they’re at your churches, they go to your schools, and because people don’t understand how prevalent it really is. Even if you’re not following along, specifically with this particular conspiracy around QAnon, there are others that travel through, as you say, not just the tracks of religion and faith, but also very much on the railroad of information, or the information superhighway as we used to call the net.   Recently, I talked to Congress about this and was thinking, I think, talking with the Senate, testifying about disinformation. One of the things that I really wanted them to understand, was what happens when you search for something like QAnon? So if you are like anybody else, you’re like, what is this thing? Right? You might start on whatever platform you prefer, you might post on your Facebook wall, “Hey, what’s QAnon?” You might go on YouTube and type in QAnon, or you might go on Twitter and do hashtag QAnon, there’s all these different ways in which you might enter into sort of the web of this network conspiracy.   But what’s really important is that, like you were saying, is that we understand how this stuff is getting surfaced, and discovered, and moving through these networks. And it really matters who you’re friends with, and what other kinds of stuff you look at online. And so the Facebook networks that you’re already a part of, the groups that you’re a part of, if a high proportion of those people are sharing things related to QAnon, you’re likely to see it more than other people. And you might get a sense from seeing it in so many places, that it’s normal, that other people are discussing it, and once it hits more mainstream media, you might start to think more people believe this than ever.   And so what I tried to do in my Senate testimony was bring up, what are we looking at when we look at internet rabbit holes, for instance. So with the QAnon rabbit hole, in particular, you have such a unique keyword, it’s not going to bring you to anything besides, at this stage, it’ll bring you to a lot of news about QAnon. But just a couple years ago, it was a small community of people that were really rifling through a bunch of different Easter eggs spread about the internet. And they were looking and saying, yeah, this feels like a clue. Tom Hanks posting a picture of himself eating pizza might be a clue. And it was all related to other conspiracy theories related to what was called before QAnon, “pizzagate,” which was a conspiracy theory that suggested that Hillary Clinton, and other Dems, and other very rich people were hiding children to be exploited in the basement of Comet Ping Pong Pizza. And evidence from the Podesta email leaks where they were ordering pizza from this Comet Ping Pong was becoming one of these clues to be found online suggesting that that celebrities were trafficking children by ordering “CP,” cheese pizza, child pornography. And so, but when we talk about Q, Q is kind of an outgrowth of that conspiracy theory, because a bunch of the places in which people have been posting “pizzagate,” you saw platform companies start to moderate and say, we don’t want this here. Reddit banned it. Pinterest banned it, that it was being de-index on Facebook. That is, it was becoming harder and harder to surface as pizzagate content.   And so QAnon was just another instantiation of this. But when we think about the rabbit hole, and I’m going to wrap on these four things you should think about, is when you’re starting to see a bunch of content online, and you’ve recently searched for a search term that you’ve never looked at before, but you were just curious, you’ll start to notice a few things happen in your internet surfing. Which is, you’ll start to see repetitive content, that is these platforms, and each platform, once you click on something, it assumes you want to see more of it. And so it’ll be repetitive.   The second thing is, you’ll start to see redundancy. That is, you’ll see repetitive content, not just on one platform, but then across platforms. This has to do with the structure in which in the background, these websites talk to each other, they leave behind what are called cookies that are supposed to enhance your advertising experience online. But also you can end up seeing lots and lots of redundant content, especially in relationship to very novel and outrageous claims like QAnon tends to make.   The third thing that’s really important is, and this is what distinguishes it, the rabbit hole online from television and radio is responsiveness. That is, when you ask the question, someone will answer you. And if you ask the question of a search engine, it will give you answers. But for many cases, up until very recently, when we have all this media about QAnon, it would actually deliver you directly to QAnon influencers, and people that were shaping the story.   And then the fourth thing that happens, and this as a consequence of the design of social media itself, is all that search, and all that clicking, and all that network activity where people around you are searching for and posting things related to this, will have a reinforcing effect. So algorithms by their design, they’re literally called reinforcement algorithms. And the point is actually pretty simple. It wants to make you see a thing, until you buy a thing. Most of the internet infrastructure is built on advertising. This is why if you search for something that you only buy once every ten years like a mattress, if you search for it, you’ll see ads for it for the next six to eight weeks. And you’re like, “why am I seeing all these ads for mattresses? I did one search on Amazon.” And it’s actually because of the substructure of the way in which internet and apps talk to each other, when you really can’t see it because it’s part of the technical infrastructure. So reinforcement is not bad, right? If it’s, you love sports, and it serves you more sports content, and it shows you, recommends more sports-related articles. That’s not necessarily bad. But it’s only if the rabbit hole is rather innocuous, If the rabbit hole is a network conspiracy, like for instance QAnon, or what’s now being touted as the quote unquote Great Reset, you end up in another place. That is to say, that you end up in this world that feels very robust. It feels like a lot of people are talking about it. But ostensibly, it’s at it’s a very small and closed set of figures that are making that content.   And Pastor, I really like that last slide about having stages of how committed people are to these conspiracies, because, yeah, you do move from a stage of people who might be attracted to it and might say something negative about the state. I mean, who likes the state anyway? Come on. Everybody loves to hate the state, that’s not that’s nothing new. But we have to wonder, what kind of actions are people going to take, as a result of knowing this information now, in believing that other people believe it. And that’s where the congregation is actually pretty interesting as a phenomenon, because one of the things that religion invites you into is to have faith. And these conspiracies to ask you to lean on those principles as well, which is to say that God will reveal. And in the case of QAnon, Q will reveal right, and so he became this messianic figure within the these groups. And so lots to talk about, excited to get to questions, and to think through the complexity of what happens when a particular conspiracy theory really takes root in your community and how you can counter or parry in defense, while at the same time, not alienating folks that are really just struggling to understand the world around us and their place in it.   FASKIANOS:  We’ll go, we already have three written questions in the queue. So let’s just start right there, and you can add any additional points you want to make. So the first written question comes from Galen Carey, who is of the National Association of Evangelicals. “How should legislators and regulators address real threats caused by conspiracy theories without harming the free speech which ordinary citizens and companies depend on as a cherished freedom?” So I don’t know who wants to take that one?   STETZER: Do we, is it one of us? Because I’d be happy to defer.   FASKIANOS: Yeah, yes, you should go.   STETZER:  Okay. All right. So good. Galen and I, just full disclosure, I’m on the executive committee of the National Association of Evangelicals, and Galen and I did not text one another about this question. And Galen, who works in public policy for us at the NAE, let’s say I mean, it’s a tricky question. For me, the immediate answer is, that may not be the place where we go first. I think, ultimately, two thousand years ago, Rome had hot and cold running water. And I know this sounds strange, but stay with me, they had hot and cold running water. And it had hot and cold running water, because people discovered a remarkably malleable metal, called lead. And so the lead pipes would take the hot and cold running water into the affluent of Rome. And historians would later, this is not the case. But soon there were books written that the fall of Rome was the madness created by lead poisoning and more. But what a technological revolution it brought.   Here’s what I would say, I think one hundred years from now, we’re going to look back at social media, and see it much like the lead pipes, it brought to us amazing things, and it weaponized so many things, and caused so much difficulty and destruction. So I think first place I would look to is how we might see those media habits changed. As Dr. Donovan mentioned, there are algorithms and algorithms, not just point to things that you like, I recently bought a backpack and I can’t stop getting backpack ads. But also what they do, is people respond more to things that they’re upset about, than the things that they’re interested in or want to dialogue about. So it creates an echo chamber where the volume goes up, up, up, up, and how could we get to a place where, I mean, there were a lot of normal people who went to Washington, DC to protest, what they thought the election that was stolen, though they were obviously misled on that. But then a subset of them, actually, many of them came home and said I can’t believe I did this. How did they get there? Well, they got there because things got normalized over time, as the anger and the fear and the echo chambers continued.   So I don’t know Galen, legally, what, or legislatively, what should be addressed, but I do know that social media is a huge part of this problem. Now, there have always been conspiracy theories. But boy, they have been accelerated exponentially, and weaponized in ways we haven’t seen before. Could it be that part of that is legislation related to how information gets passed and how algorithm? I don’t know. I’m very much a free speacher, and I’m very concerned about limitations to free speech. But I bet Dr. Donovan has more wisdom, she has testified to the Senate and I have not.   FASKIANOS: Right, and what recommendations did you make?   DONOVAN: I did make a few and it was exactly that part. Around amplification, which is to say that one of course has a right to their speech. But the internet is much more like a McDonald’s at 2:00 a.m. You can come in, you can say what you want, but the minute it starts upsetting the staff or other customers, got to go, right. And what one of the things about misinformation at scale, or network conspiracies at scale produce, is that kind of chaotic reaction.   So our research has started to look at what we call the true costs of misinformation. That is to say, what happens, QAnon has a flare up, they show up in public they do these “Save the Children” marches. How many police have to be dispatched? How many journalists have to cover it? How many people have to, in public health, for instance, have to react to claims around, of course, within this conspiracy theory there, it contains multitudes. So there’s many other conspiracy theories about vaccines, and microchips and things, how many public health officials have to deal with that? And especially when it came to the election, how many people left with a feeling of such grievance that they thought the only way to stop what’s to come, and this is a line from QAnon, “you can’t stop what’s coming.” Went to the Capitol, what are the costs that everybody else is shouldering when millions of people are exposed to these things. At the same time, it’s not the case that we’re dealing with, a few people in a town that think something rotten is happening. There’s something different about amplification and scale. And that confirmation’s everywhere, that repetitiveness, that redundancy, that makes us think that our rights are being taken away from us, that we are somehow, literally that the insurrection was about saving democracy for a bunch of these folks. They believe they would be pardoned, because of the way that certain actors were able to use these networks. And this is where it gets tricky around free speech actually, is when it comes to the actors.   Certain people within these networks are making money, like actual cash. And the second thing that they’re doing, is they’re building network power, they’re building amplification power, that is they’re growing their audiences, they’re gaining clout, and then they monetize it again later. So that incentive structure is something that we also need to pay quite a bit of attention to. Because if you can make money off of convincing people that their rights are being taken away from them, and that that the voting machines are flipping ballots in favor of the other party, in and you’re in that case, committing some kind of defamation or disingenuousness towards another company like Dominion Voting Systems.   Then we actually have to start discussing where liability falls, and for right now with the internet, liability falls on the individual poster, which is why you see Giuliani and My Pillow guy, and everybody getting sued, Fox News getting sued by this company, rather than having some kind of regulation. But we don’t actually want to normalize litigiousness around this either. And so there has to be a way in which we introduce some balance around amplification and earned media, while also balancing the cost that everybody else has to pay, in order to stop these media manipulation campaigns from accelerating and becoming profitable in the first place.   FASKIANOS: Right. We’re going to go to Helen Boursier, who has raised her hand so if you can unmute yourself, and give us your affiliation, that’d be great.     BOURSIER: Hello, Reverend Dr. Helen Boursier, I teach theology and religious studies at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota, and my primary focus in Texas, where I live, is I’m a volunteer chaplain with refugee families seeking asylum, and I do research and writing on immigration. That’s a mouthful, but it relates. I recently completed doing ethnographic interviews with my religious colleagues in Central to South Texas. And my question to you relates to this. My questions with my colleagues have been, why have they been so silent on the gross humanitarian violations at the U.S.-Mexico border and the mistreatment? Why were they silent? And much of it came back to willful ignorance. So how have you seen willful ignorance with the QAnon? Wanting to believe, and wanting to follow, and somehow getting into that space, intentionally being ignorant about the reality of it, because it reinforces what I want to believe. And then what is the religious community’s role? And I mean, the preaching, and teaching, and pastoral role, of proclamation to challenge and change what I’m calling willful ignorance and what you are calling misinformation. Long question. Sorry.   FASKIANOS: Ed, do you want to start?   STETZER: Yeah, happy to. And thank you for your work among immigrants and refugees, so essential right now. And there is a correlation, but not a complete correlation between nationalistic, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee mentality. And I don’t know the full answer to your question in the sense that, for me, on the morning of the 2018 midterms, this is the article that I ran in Vox magazine, “Fellow Evangelicals Stop Falling for Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric.” And I started the first sentence, “President Trump is trying to fool Evangelicals like me,” this time, it’s using the false that an evasion of a caravan of poor people marching through Mexico. So I don’t know, I share your concern. And I’ve tried to be a vocal advocate.   I would say that there’s an intersection, though, between QAnon, and then I’ll let Dr. Donovan give us more. But there’s a clear intersection. So I have one Snopes article with my name in it. And it has to do with that article. So that article led to a QAnon-initiated effort to connect me with Christianity Today, where I published an article with George Soros who is secretly funding all of us. And of course, Snopes kind of debunked all of that. But the reality is, I think part of having a conspiracy theory is you need a bad guy. And George Soros, by the way, there’s another reference to anti-Semitism, which I’m sure we’ll get to later, but is very much connected. And what I would say is, I think there’s two issues at work here. One is, we do need Christian leaders and pastors to speak up and out on immigrants and refugees. But I would tell you, that the National Association of Evangelicals has been consistently speaking in that space, and has not been listened to by many of the rank and file Evangelicals, who are being discipled thirty hours a week by their cable news choices, not by their pastors on Sunday morning. So I don’t know. I don’t know the answer. But I bemoan with you the situation.   DONOVAN: Yeah, I mean, a very important point about the caravan and about immigration, especially when it relates to how that specific event which seems to happen every year, there is a mass migration and, but the use of social media was so different here. And importantly, they tried to make the caravan happen three times before it really stuck. And as a key word, again, you don’t get a lot of other things when you start searching for “caravan” once there’s propaganda in the system.   So within search systems, I’m not going to get technical here. It’s very simple. It’s made to return things that are relevant and timely. So for instance, if you’re sitting in your house, and you’re on your phone, and you type in the word “salsa,” this search engine is going to try to figure out are you thinking about going dancing? Are you thinking about having dinner and needing a recipe? Or are you thinking about going to a Mexican restaurant called Salsa that’s five blocks from your house, right? And so it’s going to try to rank and sort that information based upon a bunch of different cues. And what search, the whole, the entire search engine optimization industry has figured out, is that resorting, and that shuffling that can happen, and reordering and ranking search returns, is gameable. And what you need to do is try to figure out the right combination of outrageousness, timeliness, and then how to piggyback that on to some kind of breaking news, so that you can get that timeliness bump. And we’ve seen, I’ve talked to many, many people who have huge advertising budgets about how they do this. They purchase keywords, through Google, or they figure out within Facebook, what’s popular, what people are searching for, and they rename their Facebook group that. And so you see that there’s an entire apparatus, which none of the information that you’re looking for is stable. It’s not like going to the library. And you know, with the Dewey Decimal System, that when you go to this section, there’s going to be a book that’s approximately in this area. Instead, those things shift every single day online. And, as a result, this same keywords that you would have searched for yesterday might have different search returns today. And so these, what we would call data voids, are really important ways in which we see misinformation enter into different communities, especially at very important moments where a certain topic is unfolding.   And right now we see it, of course, in the struggle around something like, for sure immigration, but also around the other day, the word Latinx was trending on Twitter. And I said to myself, that doesn’t seem real. And what I did was I looked at it, and you realize that there was a bunch of people who are mostly trolls and misogynists, some of them are actual, open racists, but they saw an opportunity where someone had typed in, a famous account, which was the Twitch account and use the spelling of women with an x. And they saw the opportunity to launch a wedge, which basically was this tweet that said, “women don’t want to be spelled with an X and neither do Latinos.” And at that moment, then, a bunch of Latinos who are conservative that don’t like Latinx, jumped in, but the originating tweet wasn’t actually from someone who was even Latino, it was from someone who basically was trying to troll Twitch, which is the gaming platform. I bring that all up to say that, as you think about willful ignorance, you also have to understand that there are people out there trying to make you find the wrong thing, or trying to make you find their contents, trying to shape your worldview. And they do that by gaming these systems. And sometimes they don’t tell you who they are. Sometimes they lie about their origins. Sometimes they see a peak opportunity, and they take it.   And so it’s actually really hard to find timely, local, relevant, and accurate information on demand online, which is really unfortunate. That’s another thing that I’ve been recommending to Senate and Congress, is that we should have public interest obligations for timelines and newsfeeds, especially in times of a pandemic.   FASKIANOS: Thank you. So the next written question comes from Jay Michaelson, who works at the intersection of politics and spirituality. He’s columnist for The Daily Beast. And this is mostly for you, Mr. Stezter. “Given the suspicion that many, I think this is in your slide, 50 percent believe the mainstream media, have suspicion of mainstream media, or think it’s misinformation? Is there anything we in those institutions can do to help combat the spread of conspiracy theories? Or does this have to be entirely an inside job?”   And I’m just going to add on to that, what would you say to the Evangelical or Protestant pastors and what they should be doing and how they should be combating this in their congregations without turning off those who are believing it?   STETZER:  So, first question was, what can we do? And I’m not sure particularly if he was speaking in terms of the media context, but let me just answer it in that context. Do better covering religion. You know, we have things like RNA, Religious News Association, others, because when religion is covered, it’s often covered poorly. And so what happens is, people read the coverage of their religious tradition and say, that’s nothing like what I know or I’ve experienced. And so they feel you know, Rachel Zoll, actually, who we recently, we lost her battle the cancer was the AP’s religion reporter. And when this article came out, this was actually before the 2016 election, “Evangelicals feel alienated and anxious.” It was actually a fair article, it described well the idea that some evangelicals feel, this is a pastor quoted, I happen to know the pastor quoted in the article, but this pastor says, “you’ll be hated by all nations for my namesake, let me tell you that time is here.” So when you believe already that there is, that the kind of the systems of the world are stacked against you, that need leads you to places to find other information, and ultimately, I would say that, there’s a blog called “Get Religion Done” by Terry Mattingly, and quoting the famous line to press just doesn’t get religion.   So get religion better, and follow just basically the AP style guide. Not everyone is a fundamentalist because they believe these things, AP style guide has a certain description of how to do that. So from a media perspective, I think the media could do better and there are good religion reporters, I mentioned RNA, there’s good religious reporters doing good work and if mentioned some, I would fail to mention enough and I’d feel bad. Second, I think, reference to what pastors and church leaders can do. We surveyed Protestant pastors, I work with a lot with Protestant pastors, mainly Evangelicals. And what I would say, I did a webinar on some of these issues with the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins. And one of the conversations we had that I thought was so helpful, was that people are persuaded by people who they see as near them or like them, not by people who they see as drastically different and far away from them. So it’s unlikely that most of Evangelicals are going to be persuaded by blank or so and so.   So for example, what we’ve done at the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, is I reached out to the CDC, we work with the HHS, and I said, help me find Evangelical Christians. And again, I think science can be brought from all different contexts. But when Francis Collins, and I had Francis Collins on, I talked about it, and he shared his faith, he’s been very open about sharing his faith. He’s the head of the National Institutes of Health. Or Jay Butler, who works at CDC Infectious Diseases, or the head of or the editor of Vaccines Magazine, or Vaccines Journal, who’s actually attended the church you mentioned earlier, Moody Church and is now the head of vaccine at Mayo, I had each of them on. And pastors and church leaders told me they played that in churches around the world because, and each time I said, “tell us about your faith, tell us about your journey.” People say, okay, this person, and again, please forgive me, but we’re trying to persuade people here. These people are in us and among us, therefore, we can trust them more readily. And what I would say is pastors and church leaders can help people hear from Evangelical scientists and leaders, I have on my radio show this weekend, Dr. Emily Smith from Baylor University, and I think she tagged herself, “your friendly neighborhood epidemiologist.” Great. So, and a professor at Baylor University in this field, so each of those. Oh, and I will tell you, I expect the radio show to be filled with people calling who are upset that I’m talking positively about vaccines on a Christian radio program.   So, but I think that’s the key. So what I tell most pastors, just tell them to ask their doctor, because they know and trust their family doctor, but then bring in some trusted voices who they’ll, they won’t discount immediately. And they’ll listen to but who also know what they’re talking about, as like Francis Collins, I know. I know, a local church can’t call in Francis Collins, but they can just Google. He was on The Daily Show yesterday, talking to Evangelicals about vaccines and encouraging them away from conspiracy theories.   FASKIANOS: Great. Next question I’m going to take from Bjorn Krondorfer, “the scholarly discussion has shifted over the last years from talking about American Evangelical fundamentalism to Christian nationalism, the latter intersecting with a particular view of what America should be, a Christian nation, and also conspiracy theories like QAnon. What’s your take on the shift of discourse? And how does racism intersect with those issues?” And he’s at Northern Arizona University.   STETZER: Dr. Donovan, I answered the last one once you jump in on that.   DONOVAN: Yeah. So one of the things that I do study is the rise of white nationalism in the United States. And I’m presently writing a book with Emily Dreyfuss and Brian Friedberg about meme wars. And one of the things that’s been really interesting to look at, and I had asked the Pastor to would keep in that slide about QAnon and the Gadsden flag is because it is a meme. It’s drawing on a history of the U.S. as particularly, democracy in America is a place in which people are proud patriots. They believe in a country. But depending upon what kind of nationalism you favor, we see white nationalist, or white supremacist elements creep into the discussion, as well as different kinds of envisioning of a nation that if there are too many religions, or too much religious diversity, then solidarity falls apart, right?   And so we’re really talking about diversity, and how much diversity can be tolerated in any given nation. Right? And so as we talk about the rise of the internet, we also have to think about historically, what kind of changes online have created new spaces for people to ask really difficult questions about the relationship between race and diversity, and nation-state. And Trump was really one of the only candidates in 2016 that was going to come out and say, “Make America Great Again.” And in that return, that “again,” is really important. I know there’s been a lot of debate about, it actually being code for saying, “make America white again.” But think about this, what does it mean to say “again,” right, especially in the context of people who were nostalgic for an America they may have never experienced, right, an America where they are told that there was less racial animus, and less racial strife, because there were clear racial hierarchies, and gender divides during the Jim Crow era, for instance. That kind of return to an America that is not inclusive, an America that does not, yields in many ways to the reality of the situation, is something that we saw nationalists really push as Donald Trump’s candidacy became more and more probable.   And the Gadsden flag was something that we started to see show up over and over and over again, because at their, at our base, Americans are actually very anti-establishment. We don’t want things to be told to us, we reject paternalism. We don’t like very bulky, centralized bureaucratic systems, except that’s government. And so over the years, especially the last four years, you’ve seen a struggle for who defines what counts as patriotic, and what counts as nationalism, when Donald Trump is in power, and he is someone who’s not afraid to say the word “nationalism.” Other leaders in other countries are not going to use that term, because of its exclusiveness, because it doesn’t lend to very friendly relationships with foreign nations. And in particular, he was very good at othering, especially people in Mexico, the whole rhetoric, and the means around, “build the wall,” where that comes from, where that sentiment comes from, and how important it was, during his campaign, are things that we have to understand. And we have to continue to reckon with, because what it did was it opened a breach that allowed for that kind of white nationalism, the idea that the nation should be much more homogenous than it is, and should recognize white people at the top of a racial hierarchy. Even if white people aren’t the majority.   That’s the other thing that’s going on here, is you also have a big discussion about demography and demographic change. And that’s why immigration is such an important issue for the right wing in particular, is because this demographic change is happening. It’s going to continue to happen, it’s not going to go away. And so the thread here, though, is that when we get to January 6, there’s a moment where people are able to not just imagine what America could be, what the return could be. But they’re able, they’re called into action. This is their calling, they are showing up to the Capitol to enact their nationalism for this country that Donald Trump had promised them, which was being stolen by the reality, which is America is moving towards a multiracial democracy. And it’s going to happen both through demographic change, but also through the transition of our political institutions, to bring in much more diversity.   And so ultimately, when we look at all the symbolism that was present on January 6, there were so many ways in which we saw different versions of nationalism, show up all in one place, because they were really fighting for an aspirational America, where even though Donald Trump was the sitting president, he still seemed to represent the anti-establishment promise of a nation ruled by the people. But of course, when you look back and you look at the rabbit holes that these people were experiencing the election through, and the chaos of the pandemic, you realize that they were being told something that just wasn’t reality for the majority of the country.   FASKIANOS: Yeah, well, sadly, that is continuing as the narrative of the election, the big lie. I’m going to go to a Don Frew, who had raised his hand so Don, if you would like to ask your question, or I can read it, I know you also put in the chat, we’d love to have another voice. Can you mute yourself?   FREW: There we go. Can you hear me?   FASKIANOS: Yes. Great with United Religions Initiative.   FREW:  Right. Ed talked specifically about how QAnon uses Evangelical language and builds on pre-existing Evangelical ideas. But to what extent does QAnon spread in other religious communities, especially those of non-Abrahamic religions?   STETZER: Yeah, so we know QAnon has engaged in places with no religion, or with other religions, and variants of it. I would say that we shouldn’t be surprised that considering Evangelicals are the largest singular religious group, I guess other than the “nones,” or the non-practicing, but the largest singular religious group. So we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s going to be particularly prevalent in our conversation, though I do mention in my concern, that it might be disproportionately influential in an Evangelical context. I’m not an expert, for example, on QAnon’s engagement in Hindu communities or things of that sort. I’ve had several conversations with imams, who tell me that it’s not QAnon per se, but conspiracy theories take root in other religious traditions, but they often emerge from other historical factors. The other religious traditions may feel marginalized or isolated for different reasons. They may feel isolated or marginalized by other groups, that then they perceive to be this way. It’s much like the earlier question, where we talked a lot about Christian nationalism.   But it’s important to note that nationalism is on the rise globally. I mean, Duterte in the Philippines, Bolsonaro, Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brazil. And for that matter, the elections in Quebec in 2018, were, shocked the world with the rise of nationalism. So some of those places are very irreligious, Quebec, much more irreligious, one of the most irreligious communities in the Americas. And some of them are remarkably religious, like the Philippines, or even Brazil, for that matter. So I think there’s not always that correlation. Here where we are, it’s easy and right to make the connection, I think, with Christian nationalism, but I think ultimately, there’s a rising nationalism around the world, which I think has significant geopolitical implications that we need to address not all of it’s about religion.   FASKIANOS: Okay. I’m going to take the next question from Palwasha Kakar, who is at the United States Institute of Peace. “I’m interested in hearing more about Pastor Ed’s work with Evangelical pastors, how do you help them identify and work on deradicalization? Do you build on the international CVE, countering violent extremism, work in this area? Or how does it differ in your understanding?”   STETZER: First, we don’t call it deradicalization. First thing, but because nobody sees themselves as that. But I get exactly what you’re saying and appreciate the work of deradicalization. The language I used at the beginning, and the way, because I’ve written a lot to try to persuade Evangelicals on some of these issues. And I actually have, and I know it’s very easy for us to sit back and say, “oh, those QAnoners,” well, I actually have friends in the, who are self-identified QAnoners, in the Evangelical community, who actually text me when I’m being discussed on QAnon message boards. And they say they defend me on those message boards. But that’s another story for another day.   So for me, I try to frame in such a way that people can receive the message. And again, for us that often comes around in terms of discipleship. I talked about this on NPR’s Morning Edition. And the host asked me, and I kind of struggled because it’s like, it’s insider baseball language. I said, so there are things, I explained, that as Christians we want to disciple in, and things that as Christians, we want to disciple out. So what needs to be discipled in, in 2021? Well, it might be seeing yourself as a “world Christian,” seeing that men and women from every tongue, tribe, and nation are, that’s frequent language in the pages of the Scriptures. It might be helping people to see that, and language I often use is that we should not be among the gullible.   And I actually would point out, I mean, I do just so we’re clear, I do believe, I bet my whole life on the fact that there was a person who was dead on Friday, and on Sunday was back from the dead, and everything I believe, is framed and shaped around that reality. But I do point out how, as our Christian witnesses impacted the last slide that I didn’t get to, because I went too long in the first session, actually talks about the danger to our Christian witness. I lead the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center. So I care deeply about our Christian witness. And I pointed out somebody who kept posting about this QAnon conspiracy, and this QAnon conspiracy, and this one, and then it came to Easter, and they said, “oh, and Jesus rose from the dead.” And I would just say it’s really hard to persuade a world about a supernatural event called the resurrection, when you’ve posted six other things about bizarre conspiracy theories from pizza, Comet Ping Pong, to Seth Rich, and some of you know these different references, to Wayfair, to whatever else it may be. So I do try to frame it around, I will say that Jesus literally himself says he’s the truth. And I try to remind people that the last conspiracy, so many people jumped in the Wayfair conspiracies, some of you missed that, but it became a thing for a few days. And I encourage people, go back lovingly to those people and say, listen, that obviously wasn’t the case. Or somebody showed up at the Comet Ping Pong with a gun to find a basement. And there was no basement. And so at which point, do you say I’ve been fooled four times. But yeah, here’s the thing. Me, you, that’s not going to happen, when their pastor pulls them aside, when they’re friends.   And so what we’ve actually done, even in my own church, had someone upset and leave, because I have been advocating for vaccines. And they said, I’ve been fooled and tricked. And I have noticed that since I took the vaccine, my 5G cell phone reception is just way better. But that’s another story for another day. Sorry. I appreciate you getting the joke there, Irina. But what I would say is, is that what we did is when that person posted,” I’m leaving the church because our teaching pastor is for vaccines.” We just had somebody go and say, and talk to them, and I think they still left mad. But they also now engage a different congregation and seem to have moderated their views. So remember that people are best persuaded by people they already trust. And I think that’s going to be a key thing for co-religionists, not just in Evangelicalism like I am, but for other religions as well.   FASKIANOS: Thank you, I’m going to try and sneak in one last question from Bud Heckman, who has raised his hand. So Bud, over to you, and then if you could both give final thoughts, that would be great. And I apologize to everybody, we couldn’t get to all your questions. So. Your mic is open, Bud, so go ahead. We can’t hear you. Oh, it’s not working.   STETZER: That was anticlimactic.   FASKIANOS: That was anticlimactic. That is just too bad. Let’s see. I’m just looking. I guess we could just look into the final questions to see, if we could maybe just end with this one. According to recent poll, over half of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. What hope do religious leaders have to effectively counter digital misinformation in a society in which so many people are misinformed? This goes back to an earlier question.   STETZER: Dr. Donovan to you?   DONOVAN: Well, I mean, I can’t speak for religious leaders, but it affects all of us. But, if we look back to 2016, what happened immediately following Donald Trump’s win, was there was a wave of liberal, “not my president” protests. People can both believe that someone is not their president, or reject the outcome, it doesn’t actually necessarily have to directly lead to insurrection. Right? And so we can have doubt, I think, and that’s one of the things that religion helps us deal with, is the doubts that we have the questioning of leadership, the questioning of our morals, the questioning of social order.   And I think it’s really important that people do think through what it is that’s causing them doubt and I’m very, I was little like, “am I the right person for this conversation with CFR?” I know a lot about disinformation. And I know a lot about different techniques that we might use to counter, or debunk or pre-bunk misinformation. But one of the things that I really dug into when I decided to do this panel, is I said to myself, well, if there’s going to be a vector by which we do, combat disinformation, faith is going to have to be one of them. Which is to say that we’re going to need many pastors and religious leaders to speak up, to set the terrain of the debate, to help people understand that they might have doubts, they might have fears, but also that religious leaders can learn from this information research. Exactly what we discussed here today, that it’s really about the route the information takes to get to people, the sort of ambiguities that the conspiracy theory is supposed to be answering for them. Conspiracy theories really are about synthesizing information and making a simple scapegoat, so that you can kind of either make your determinations and then deal with it.   A lot of conspiracy theories end up with, well, there’s nothing I can do about that. The earth is flat. Well, there’s nothing I can do about that. And so it’s only when we get the combination of conspiracy theories matched with calls to action, that we have to be really cognizant, and then we have to activate. And then we have to have people who are trusted in our communities, be on the front lines of that activation, whether it’s up from the pulpit saying, you may have heard this, and I saw it on our Facebook page earlier this weekend, I think we should challenge that, I think that we should go this route, I think we should pray about it. Because I think that ignoring it isn’t going to help. And for right now, I think also we need to activate a public, like a mass awareness about the fact that a very small group of people are benefiting from the situation as it is designed, including platform companies are making a ton of money by advantaging openness and scale, which is really just handing over the keys to our cognitive security, to any old person that wants to run one of these manipulation campaigns. And at the same time, the rest of us are still trying to figure out simple, basic information about, back in 2020, it was how to vote, when to vote, where to vote, which would bring you into a bunch of propaganda, if you were searching for that, or how to get a vaccine. And so I see a huge role and an opportunity here for people to start to question and have doubt, but also have resolve to try to figure out well, what is the right course of action? And how dangerous is this in comparison to what I might be able to do something about in my own life. And so that’s how I’ve come to think of the problem. And I’m really just intrigued by the pastor’s research and can’t wait to read more.   FASKIANOS: And Pastor Stetzer, any last words from you to leave us with and what people can do.   STETZER: Faith traditions, Evangelicalism, my faith tradition, has a long history of making mistakes and resetting, and making mistakes and resetting. After the January 6 riots, I wrote an article in USA Today called, “Evangelicals Face a Reckoning.” And I think that’s true. And part of that’s internal. So our hope is, my hope is, as someone who literally believes the things I’m not some outsider, I really do see how God is even at work in the world, and work in our churches, that our churches will stand up and stand out in a difficult time, many have in ways of serving their communities, in the midst of COVID, I think we need to serve our communities, through intellectual discipleship, better ways of thinking politically. And helping people. Gullibility is not a spiritual gift. And we have to help people to be more discerning in their understanding of the culture and the context around them. It’s multifaceted. We talked about actions that different parts and parties need to place, I spent a lot of time just two hours ago, I’m at a meeting in Colorado, just spoke on some of these issues.   One of the most controversial days for many people, many pastors who texted me, was the Sunday after the election in November. Do I pray for President-Elect Biden? This has never been a question before. Everyone always prayed, I guess during maybe Bush v. Gore, the Bush-Gore, afterwards, people were unsure. But this is a case where the election was soon called, by all main, even including Fox News, all mainstream news. Yet pastors didn’t know what to do and still struggled with it. It’s going to take some courage. But that’s hopefully, that courage comes from a relationship with the Lord that causes us to want to do what the writer of Hebrews says, and I’ll close with this. Hebrews is a book in the New Testament. The Hebrews says, to provoke one another, love and good deeds, I think that’s part of our responsibility, to tell the truth, help people understand the truth, and to make sure that the truth is the focus of our beliefs, and what’s propagated amongst our congregations. Thanks so much for the opportunity to share.   FASKIANOS: Thank you both. This is really fantastic. And we look forward to reading your forthcoming books, your past books, listening to you on air on your show, Ed Stetzer Live, and you can also follow them both on Twitter, Joan Donovan @BostonJoan, and Ed Stetzer, @EdStetzer. So please do that. I also encourage you to follow CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy program on Twitter @CFR_religion. Reach out to us at [email protected], with ideas, suggestions, we will also be circulating the link to this webinar. So you can watch it again because there’s a lot of good information. And share it with your colleagues. So thank you both and thank you all. We look forward to continuing the discussion.

SINGH:  Hi, everyone. I'm Simran Jeet Singh, senior advisor for diversity and inclusion at YSC Consulting and a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary. I'm delighted to be moderating today's discussion on religious nationalism around the world. And I'd like to introduce our three esteemed panelists for today, Sylvester Johnson, Azza Karam, and Mark Juergensmeyer. You have access to their full bios on the CFR conference app. But I want to share a brief overview of who you have the privilege of hearing and learning from today. Dr. Sylvester Johnson is the founding director of the Virginia Tech Center for Humanities, and also assistant vice provost for humanities at Virginia Tech, and executive director of the university's “Tech for Humanity” initiative. Dr. Johnson holds a faculty appointment in the department of religion and culture and authored The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity, a study of race and religious hatred. Dr. Azza Karam serves as the secretary general of Religions for Peace, the largest multi religious leadership platform. Since 2004, Dr. Karam has served in various positions with the United Nations as well as other inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations since the early 1990s. And Mark Juergensmeyer is distinguished professor of sociology and global studies, and affiliate professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was also the founding director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. Professor Juergensmeyer is the author or editor of over thirty books. So I'll begin by turning to you, Professor Juergensmeyer, to help us set the stage. When we talk about religious nationalism. What do we mean? And as we're looking around the world today, how are you seeing religious nationalism, manifesting itself and being deployed?   JUERGENSMEYER: Thanks, Simran, for that question, and it's a good one. Because it doesn't mean that religion is nationalist by its nature. Nor does it mean the nationalism is religious by its nature. But from time to time in the history of the nation state, there has been a kind of fusion of national identity with religious affiliation. And sometimes this is an innocent sort of identity. But sometimes it's much more strident, particularly when it's meant to exclude groups within society that are not part of the dominant religion. And alas, I think this is what we've been seeing in the last 30 years since I've been studying this phenomenon around the world. And this really is a global phenomenon. I've been tripping around the world from place to place talking with people, because I'm the kind of sociologist who feels like that the best way to know how people think, is to go and talk with them. So that's what I've been trying to do. And it's been a really interesting series of studies. But the conclusion is that this is a global phenomenon. Initially we thought this was a Muslim problem. But now it's become an issue around the world. And alas, it carries that tinge of exclusivity with it. In the global era, everybody can live everywhere. And this means that there is now a new kind of movement to just standardize the notion of nationalism and identify it with one particular culture. Well, that can alienate a lot of people, and sometimes, sadly, in a very brutal way.   SINGH: Thank you. I appreciate that. And Dr. Karam, I want to know what you're seeing when it comes to religious nationalism. Does it feel like it's changing, adapting growing in influence? Or does it seem like more of the same, the same phenomenon and logic and simply a new form?   KARAM: Thank you very much Simran for that excellent question. And let me begin by saying, I have to give due credit to CFR and to Irina Faskianos and the team at CFR for putting this this series of conversations together. I have learned so much and been very enriched. And I think Simran that you chose that question very deliberately, because it's a very hard one to answer. So let me just take a stab at it. I actually think quite frankly, that once we saw the big meta narratives of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, collapse of the Berlin Wall, there was, if you will, either an intentional or unintentional search for bigger narratives, those because we're used to big narratives. There's liberalism, communism, socialism, and all of a sudden, none of that seems to have been very workable. In fact, plenty of things crumbling in terms of the ideologies.   So here we are searching for new ideas, and I think Professor Juergensmeyer had his hand on the pulse many years ago when he identified religious nationalism as an ideology. That is actually, quite frankly up and coming. Just ten to fifteen years ago, we wouldn't have dreamed of a situation where religion can become such a, as anybody heard of the Islamic State before had we would we have thought of something called an Islamic State, I mean that the fact that they dare to call themselves such in the first place, I think we realized that it has become almost normalized to identify nation with religion before we used to see two maybe nations around the world like this. Now, you realize it's a much more common tendency to see religion as very much part of a national identity, of a territorial identity. I thought we had circumvented this and grown out of it from the old empires. I mean, the old empires used to be religious in nature, right? I had assumed we had grown out of this. But clearly, the collapse of the meta narratives of political meta narratives has led to the collapse, has led to an emergence, a search, a hunger, and now, I think, a marriage of convenience that is expanding in scope, between religious and political narratives, such that sometimes it's exceedingly difficult to make the dividing line. Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really ever, was it ever a situation of Muslims versus Jews? Really? Since when? Palestinians are Christian too, but we see it in those terms over time that we almost don't notice that there are multiple religions at stake in this space, because it's become so religionized in the way that the discourse itself is manifested. It's become so incredibly politicized in the way that the religion is understood and practiced.   So this is now the new normal, unfortunately, and it tears my heart out. And it deeply disturbs me, because politics is about the interests of the few, to try to maximize the interests of the few. Politics has never been about the interests of everybody. There's a clear line of distinction, massive, wide expanse between philanthropy and politics. Politics is about the interest of me and you, if we happen to be on the same side, all the better, but usually, we're on different sides. So how do I get my interest? Religion isn't supposed to be in this space. It's not supposed to be about this space. And if history has taught us anything, it is that the minute this marriage happens, and it becomes normal, it becomes the new normal. That is when we unravel, we unravel as human beings, we unravel as nation states, we unravel quite frankly, our own religious institutions continue to unravel, because they're not beginning to unravel. They've been unraveling for a while, but they continue to unravel. So this unraveling may be good, maybe an opportunity, but quite frankly, it is usually associated with violence, and that violence is never an opportunity. That is deathly. That is the cost of lives. And as we're seeing today, now, in almost every corner of the world, that religious political affiliation has led to an is leading to increasing violence, which is leading to active loss of life. That formula is not good.   SINGH: I appreciate that. That's, that's really well said and Dr. Johnson, I'd love for you to take us from the global and help bring us home. Clearly, religious nationalism is not just an external problem, as we've as we might like to think we've seen the rise of white nationalism and Christian nationalism here in the US. How does what we're seeing out there, meaning other forms of religious nationalism, how does that comport with what we're seeing here in America today?   JOHNSON: Thanks so much, Simran, that's really great question. And you're right, the problem of religious nationalism is certainly not exclusive of the United States. We see multiple ways that some of the developments happening abroad in France, for example, the effort to require Muslims, Imams particularly, to sign on to a charter of French values that targets Islam as being a religion that is somehow in conflict with French values. This is a new, unique imposition onto Muslims are being asked to do things that no other religion is being asked to do, on gender parity, for example, which is not being asked to Jews or Christians. Or if we think about what's happening at the conflicts around the meaning of being a citizen of India between Muslims and Hindus in way that is attached to definition of the nation that securitizers. Or even in China. The incarceration of Muslims and forced placement into so-called training camps that are actually carceral systems. We see important and troubling parallels in the United States. We just had a Muslim travel ban in the United States, for example, for many years, we have an incredibly elaborate really deeply harmful system of securitization in the United States. That's been part of the so-called counter terrorism. One example of this is the FBI is program called countering violent extremism, which sticks out and criminalizes social activism among Muslims.   That that calls it radicalization, that actually ends up entrapping and criminalizing, particularly young Muslims who might be involved, for example, ironically, activists who target anti-Muslim bias. This gets read by the FBI and police departments as terrorists radicalization, even though it's a social justice effort. Or even the effort to raise funds in order to support indigent Muslim families of these forms of activism have for years now then classified as either precursors of, or evidence of terrorist behavior, or Muslim radicalization, and has been criminalized. And so one of the parallels we see is the association between the efforts to securer times, the state, and this form of religious nationalism, where Muslims are treated as somehow being inherently at odds with or in opposition to what it means to be truly part of the US. And there, there are other ways that this happened. So what I just described was very much about the national security entities and programs and carceral systems, that is not at all suggested separate and apart from what we may think of in a more popular fashion. As religious nationalism among non-state actors among religious communities, for example, or in popular literature, or in educational systems. And so we also see in in more popular ways of recounting the essence of the nation that is in by Christian nationalism, pointing to the roots of the United States, particularly in white Protestant religion, for instance. And then just more broadly in Christianity, that of course, that's at odds with Muslims and Jews. African religions, such as Yoruba and Santeria, for example, those have also been targeted. So both in terms of just defining what it means to belong to the United States, more culturally, and also more particularly in terms of securitization practices. These are very troubling and important parallels.   SINGH: Yeah, that's really insightful. And I think what I'm hearing from you all is both the sort of the real-life examples around the world, including at home. And also the elucidation of what's happening and why. Dr. Juergensmeyer, I want to turn to you. As we start thinking about solution building. Now we have a better sense of what religious nationalism is, we feel a sense of urgency around it. And I would love to have a little bit more clarity in diagnosing the problem. Some say religious nationalism is a chicken and egg issue. Is it religious nationalism a religious symptom of a political problem, or a political symptom of a religious problem, or is it both at the same time? So I'd love for you to help us dig into that question a little bit and better understand what's going on here so that we might address it more effectively.   JUERGENSMEYER: In my study of religious nationalist movements around the world, I think my answer is decisively the first of those two options you gave. I'm a professor of just putting together multiple-choice questions. I know, often the answer is C, all of the above. D, none of the above. But in this case, I think that religious nationalism is where religion is a symptom of a political problem. And I say that because as I studied these movements, I don't see any, or very rarely do I see people who are embracing a political perspective and a national perspective, for reasons of belief or reasons of faith. It's for reasons of identity. I mean, religion can mean many different things. It can mean, the piety of your grandmother as she's lighting a candle. Or it could mean people who don't seem to be all that religious, but they are defending Islam, or they're defending Christianity, or they're defending Buddhism. And that's a sign of religion as a part of identity, a part of a social identity. And I think this is primarily the feature of religious nationalism around the world today. There are some exceptions, but primarily. And that means the sense of a fractured identity of people who feel like they are not being represented, they're not being heard. This is fundamentally a political problem. It's a political social problem. And that it's, you know. It's not just a problem of leadership, but also a problem of the conception of a political entity, the conception of public order of public life.   And there was a time when we kind of dominated with the Enlightenment vision of secular societies. But even the Enlightenment vision thought that these would-be nation states should be around relatively culturally homogenous groups, in the European mind that spoke the same language, spoke the same religion. In an era of globalization, all this is up for grabs. The three big problems in the global era; one is identity, accountability, and security identity. Who are you if everybody can live everywhere? And does? You know, who are you? And who is the nation? And accountability? Who's in charge? If everything is made everywhere? And you're part of massive communication, global communication patterns? And how can you be secure? How can you be safe? So it's no surprise, I think, that all of these cases that we've been talking around the world, including our own country, religion is seen as a sort of antidote to these divisive features of globalization. That's not religion's fault. That happens, it's just a part of the character of societies that we're in as the world increasingly shifts towards a more globalized world. And for many of this, this is good. We enjoy personally. in Southern California, I really enjoy the diversity of ethnic communities, because I love to eat. And the kind of food that is suddenly available is just remarkably proliferating, and not just the food, but the cultures.  I don't have to go to India to meet with Punjabi anymore, I could just go down the street. And there they are. So I mean, for me, this is wonderful to be in touch with all aspects of the world, just in my own backyard. But I can see how that threatens some people. Like I see how some people feel that their world is falling apart, it's not secure, they don't know what's happening. They don't know who's in charge anymore. And they don't know who they are anymore. And that's, that's very deep. This is not just a political issue, it's a personal issue. We're talking people's sense of identity; their lives were deeply touched. So you can, I think, understand the kind of passion that's so frequently associated with a passion that sometimes turns out in awful ways. And that's, of course, the problem. But at least you can understand what created in the first place.   SINGH: Thank you, Mark. Appreciate that. And Dr. Karam, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Are you seeing the same things as Professor Juergensmeyer in terms of how politics and religion are intersecting to produce religious nationalism?   KARAM: So first of all, allow me to answer that question by what I should have done before, which is to wear another hat entirely, not to speak for Religions for Peace, but to speak as the professor of religion and development at the University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. So I can have a little bit more freedom to say what I'm about to say, which is going to provoke everybody and nobody. First of all, Professor Juergensmeyer very astutely observed that we were dominated quote, unquote, by “enlightenment thinking.” The truth of the matter is that some of us never were dominated by enlightenment thinking, because that was pretty much pertinent to the Western Hemisphere. If that whole space. I come from a part of the world where a nationalist Egyptian nationalist leader in 1919 said very clearly, at the height of the liberation struggle from the British colonial administration said, I am a Christian by religion, but a Muslim by culture. He was a Coptic, Christian and Egyptian, a liberation fighter. So I think we have to understand that for most of the world, religion has always been so integrally part of the cultural domain. So even if you were secular in your orientation, not necessarily observant in your religion, quite frankly, it didn't matter, you still belong to that religion in some way, shape, or form, which is the point I agree with Professor Juergensmeyer that it was about identity. But my point is, it been about identity forever and a day, always in some parts of the world. And I think what by not noticing this, by looking at the entire world through the prism of enlightenment thinking, we ignored, we overlooked, we sidetracked, we marginalized that appreciation for religion.   As part of our culture, as part of who we are, as part of how we speak, I have heard people around me say “inshallah” a thousand times, not because they necessarily believe that there's an Allah, but because it's a way of speaking, and I'm used to it, and they got used to it.  That speaks volumes for how we have integrated the religious into the very pores and fabric of our being. And by not seeing it by consecutive Western administrations over so long, by not understanding and indeed, now seeing it, and trying to instrumentalize it, and the actors in its name to respond to those who are reclaiming the religious as the political, that are reclaiming our religious identity. They always were Muslims, or Christians or Jews, they always were. But they're reclaiming it as a political statement. They're reclaiming it as a matter of asserting an interest. And the interest is in land, or in space, or in demography, or you name it. It's about reclaiming the religious discourse, as part of our political orientation, and our interest-based negotiation with one another. This reclaiming is happening in a certain part of the world, too. It's happening right here in the United States of America. We saw quite a bit of it with the previous administration, but we're still seeing it in action today. So to think that this is a recent dimension is to continue to look through a lens that has yet to appreciate and become just minimally literate about how the rest of the world has always had religion as part of its identity.   When we spoke, and thank you so much, Sylvester, for mentioning the countering violent extremism dynamics and rhetoric, which suggested that the counter point was we had to create an alternative discourse. What? The FBI had to create an alternative Muslim discourse?  Really? Since when? I mean, hallelujah, if they could I claim it, but, good grief, really? But this notion that you can use the religious because you nicely parcel it out. And now let's use it, and now let's renovate it. And let's support those who are trying to renovate, and modernize, and become moderates. Since when is my faith a tool for any politician? Since when will I cede that ground for anyone to determine how I live my faith? How I understand my reality, how I exercise my right of citizenship and essence to be? Since when does anyone take that right? Unfortunately, that right has been taken left, right, and center. On the one side by academics, on the other side by governments. And today, religious nationalism means that at the same time, as in the old days, in the 1919 era, when we were fighting off British colonialism, and British colonialism was coming back and saying, oh no no no, we're very much on the side of women, we really would like to support women and women's rights. It's all about empowering women in this country, in the street, because the religion is so anti.   I realized we're actually part of that same process again, today, in 2021. And we're still talking about trying to fend off a cultural sense of domination in the name of the religion, but actually, its politics, its interest, at the end of the day. So as I refuse to cede the grounds of my faith and its narrative, I also refuse to accept an ideology, whether it comes from within my own religious community or from outside of it, that tries to tell me that religious nationalism can actually be a good thing. It isn't a good thing, because when you nationalize my faith, you have nationalized my body. And that is not on the market, and never was and never will be. So how do we change this way of thinking? Well, we have to completely break up that paradigm that assumes that religion and faith are something that we can use, and we can nicely distill. And then let's see what we can do with it once we distill it. You can't distinguish an identity, you can't distill the way I think and break up and say, Okay, we'll take your words up to this point, the word “inshallah” will be omitted. Well, I'm sorry, inshallah was actually what I wanted to say at the very beginning. So there's a cacophony of issues here. But if I fight this struggle alone, within my own faith tradition, or within my own country, I get nowhere, really, really fast. I get lynched.   As you can see from so many examples in so many different parts of the world, what has been supremely helpful, supremely important is the alliance building that takes place between people who have their faith at the core of their hearts and identity, but at the same time, are committed to justice for everyone, including the other who's hurting me, including the other who's hurting me. And this is the call that we have at this moment in time, in Religions for Peace, that the reason I left the UN to join this because I realized that the moment is now to call for those who are hurting us to be part of the beloved community that I want to be part of. This is not the time to keep alienating and pointing fingers and saying mine or yours or this or hers. No. All religions, all faiths are tested today. All religious institutions, all religious communities, all faith-based NGOs, every single one of us is being tested today. We are people of faith. Yes, some of us the definition between those of us who are fighting and struggling for human rights for all, including our planet, and those who are deciding to carve out a space for themselves and claiming that it is for their own protection and their own their own space, as if we can live in that isolation. As if we can we have. We have a global pandemic telling us not one of us can live in safety. Yet we are fighting one another in different parts of the world. Because we think that this enclave will remain safe. Well, good luck with that. If and when religions come together, to serve together not even just to speak together, even though God knows that is brilliant. But if and when religions are capable of coming together to serve together that will break the paradigm that we are currently seeing where those who have interests to serve politically, including defunct political institutions, which are lacking in legitimacy entirely. Where those same institutions seek to serve, to take their religion to serve their interests. The only way to combat that is when the religious, the faithful comes together to serve together every other one, not only their own communities, that is the antidote.   SINGH: That's powerful. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Karam. And Dr. Johnson over to you. I'd love to hear your reflections on the relationship between religion and politics as it comes to religious nationalism. And where do we go from here?   JOHNSON: I really want to echo the comments of the other panelists who pointed to the very troubling ways that the political domain is intersecting with religion. One of the things that has become important in trying to explain the phenomenon is called the racialization of religion. I think is very helpful for thinking about historically, across many centuries. So Dr. Karam, you were talking about these empires of old have really used this political understanding of religion. And then we have these more modern examples of this, where there was a sense of belonging to a political community that was rooted in some religious identity. So the history of Christendom, we see that in the Islamic societies, we see actually different kinds of structures that point to some possible solutions. But all of that is to say that, if we think about one of the most influential figures in shaping politics, he didn't claim to be doing this, but in relationship to religion and race. is Samuel Huntington. He wrote an article in the 1990s that was entitled The Clash of Civilizations that became a book a few years later, that unlike many books that academics write, became very common reading by people who were not even in academia, particularly those who were in the U.S. State Department. and in other countries, who were particularly in the West, thinking about the relationship of their nation states. What they were beginning to see as some Western struggle against Islam.   I say beginning, but obviously there was something called the Crusades, many, many centuries ago. So that's not the first time something like that this happened. But it is certainly a more recent iteration. And one of the things that Huntington explained is that, he said, in the past, the conflicts of the world were based on nations against nations. But in our time, we're going to see cultures against cultures. It's going to be this deep cultural thing. And he claimed to be talking about cultures. And if you actually read that book and see what he's talking about, it was against Muslims, and it was against China. And who was against Muslims and China? It was Europe. It was it was the West. And so he didn't claim to be talking about religion and rights, but what he was actually doing, and it wasn't new, I'm not trying to claim you invented racism, but he made it very popular with other people, such as Bernard Lewis, who had a similar kind of set of claims that were also widely embraced popularly, as well as by people who were in foreign policy and state policy. They were treating religion as a fundamental type that functions in the way that scholars have tried to describe what race does. And that is it's seeing this fundamental type as having a certain set of characteristics. It's not reducible to biology, even though people often think of race through biology, we have history we see it's actually all kinds of things, language, and the susceptibility to criminality, etc.   But all of that is to say that the racialization of religion really manifests this intersection of religion and politics, because what we get is an understanding of who gets to belong in our political community. You're not really a member of fill in the blank. It could be name your country. France, India, China, the United States, unless you are this. And so what we're dealing with the resurgence of Christian nationalism in the United States is this intensified emphasis on claiming a story about the roots of the West and then drilling down to the US. And then projecting that globally up. We can think of Eric Prince, for example, who was a former military person, led his own private military company of Blackwater, that generate a lot of money. It was based on an anti-Muslim bigotry, and it became part of the way the United States operationalized its struggle against Muslims in the name of securing the nation. So what does that mean for solutions? And I think that we certainly have to go beyond some of the important and necessary measures that have been talked about before of really using education of encouraging dialogue. There's certainly a place for that. We should not stop dialogue, and not stop educating people. But we also have to deal at multiple levels with this.   So in different ways, all of the panelists have been talking about a certain construction of the West, for example, that is based on a falsehood. Most people in the West have never heard of Averroës Ibn Rushd. He was celebrated in his own time that 12th century as the father of secularism. And he was especially call that by people who live in the so-called Christian West. But today we hear that Muslims somehow are beyond the pale of these formations of the secular and that there's something that is just supposed to be admissible, even though Western Europeans attributed his genealogy secularism to a Muslim scholar, it's also true. You can study philosophy today, in most western countries, and you will almost never read any writings of a Muslim. You will not be required to learn Arabic. And with rare exceptions, that is just if you understand the actual history of Western philosophy, that should be ridiculous, because the actual history of philosophy was something that was largely rooted in engagement, the Muslim thinkers. So what are we trying to say here? We have to, in a very vigorous way, really demythologize this construction of the West from the ground up and it needs to happen in at many levels and needs to be reflected in our language about foreign policy, the debate of whether Turkey should be part of the UN.   You know, the idea that it was a different continent is absurd. I mean, even thinking of Europe, as a very separate place on the earth. But we have to demythologize the West. And we have to do that in multiple levels, not just in school textbooks. But in terms of our policy and our media coverage and how we represent, we have to focus on the future of technologies. Because I do think, that when we particularly understand the securitization practices, there is so much control over populations and, as Eric Prince demonstrates, there is so much control over populations, that is happening through technology, if it's Mossad or the CIA, or the FBI. The people who are writing code, who are surveilling, who are developing algorithms that are going to be part of the securitization practices. So we have to focus on the future talent that is actually going to create technologies that can have so many consequences, that will have so many quantum consequences for human security. And we have to make sure that future talent is grounded in a very critical understanding of the things that we're talking about, which means that we have to have a much more comprehensive approach to what we think preparing future talent technology is, because there's going to be a lot more control over very vulnerable populations, through the kinds of state surveillance practices and predictive algorithms that are happening. And that is a huge, huge opportunity and an urgent need for us to actually address these issues. And finally, I would say that we have to move beyond the Manichaean divide, that we often use globally.   And this is a real problem in the West, particularly, to talk about things like human rights and rogue nations. We have to stop using, particularly, a Western bias against nonwhite governments and nonwhite populations. When we think about justice, and what government is just because if you pay attention to the way governments treat, particularly their minority populations, I don't mean that only narrowly, but also in terms of their power. You can't come up with this Manichaean binary list of good nations over here and rogue nations over there. If you look at the way the United States or any Western nation treats minority populations, then suddenly that list of who's on the good side, who's on the bad side looks very different. Why do I raise that? Because so much of the targeting of religious minorities again is happening through this securitization, discourse, and practices. And in the West, it's this idea that we need to guard against some threat from non-Western nations from non-Western culture. And in Huntington's term, you know, either from China, which he reduced to being based on the Confucian culture, or Islamic societies as the Muslim enemy. And when we pay attention to that, we will realize that binary system of dividing countries and the good and bad actually doesn't work, we need a more complicated process. And that's actually going to have very direct implications for how our foreign policies and our national security practices would otherwise get implemented. You'd have to be much bigger and more equitable.   SINGH: Thank you, Dr. Johnson. Dr. Juergensmeyer, over to you. As we, as we think about solutions, where we go from here, surely, we all know some of the most obvious ways forward, that we've repeated for decades, right dialogue, religious literacy, etc. It seems that we need to go deeper, or at least go further. And so when you envision solutions for religious nationalism, what do you see?   JUERGENSMEYER: Good question. And in an answering that, let me turn back just a second to comments from my wonderful colleagues. It's been so much fun to be a part of this discussion. Because I'd love to go out with these guys and have a chance to just chat all evening. Unfortunately, you can't do that on Zoom. But I've learned so much from Professor Johnson and Professor Karam, which I agree with almost entirely. And following up on a comment by Professor Johnson talking about the invention of secularism, which is also part of the Enlightenment project, along with the invention of religion, as if it was something different from ordinary culture. These are really recent inventions. But in doing so, they really produced alternative ideologies and some of the big, biggest threats to public life are not just religious nationalism, but anti-religious nationalism. A second are crackdowns like in, Azza Karam, I don't want to pick up on your country, Egypt, but here you have a rather striking secondary dictatorship if I can use that word. It was used to put down the threat of religious nationalism, of Islamic nationalism in the country. Well, maybe the previous government would have not been, you know, good for Egyptians but the alternative is pretty severe also. And it's done in the name of countering religious nationalism. Of course, this is China's position now, against the Muslim Uyghurs and the Tibetan Buddhist.   The threat of the possibility of religious nationalism has created its own problems, and its own kind of authoritarianism. And then a follow up on something that Professor Karam said. At one point earlier, she talked about the religion as a nation of politics, and, and how, yeah, it's true that religious identities have been part of public life for forever. But the kind of stridency in this particular politicization is a is a real thing. Let me give you a specific example. Right before the pandemic began, I was in Iraq doing research for the book that came out this year called God at War. And I met in prison with a farmer militant, while he was still militant with ISIS, although he's now in prison in Kurdistan and northern Iraq, and I was able to have some long interviews with him. At one point I was asking you, how did you have this happen? How did you get into this? Tell me your life story. And he started talking about early days in Mosul where he used to have Shia playmates, and the Shia and the Sunni, all got along together, they're all part of one family. And there's no sense of any kind of major difference. And I said, well, what happened? And he said, well, after the American invasion and the rise of Shia political power in Iraq. And then we began to realize that they were really out to persecute us Sunnis. And then he said in prison, after he had joined one of these movements, he really became radicalized and saw the Shia, not just as enemies but as demonic beings, as devils, and people who should be killed. And I said, do you still believe that? He said, yes. You know, if I had Shia around, I would kill them. And I said, what about your old playmates that you grew up with when you were a little boy in Mosel? He said yes. Even them.   What an extraordinary thing. What happened in his life, and what happened in Iraq society to make this dramatic shift? Well, if it was a cataclysmic event in which religion became politicized, or politics became religionized in a way that it hadn't been before. And I think, in different ways, that's what's happening around the world, where people used to get along with each other, they didn't think in terms of religion, and they thought about identity and getting along with each other. And now increasingly, those labels carry social freight and social significance, because the premium on it is political power, and national identity. And that's the issue. So how do you free yourself from that? I think part of it is understanding and not just dismissing the religious nationalists, the extremists, as simply crazy. The other do crazy things. I mean, January 6, was pretty crazy. And then you look at the different people who were involved. You know, they were just ordinary folks back in suburban Phoenix or wherever, and then they got on a flight, and they came up to Washington to join the cause. Well, okay. What can we do in our lives? And what can we do as a society to give a sense that this kind of multicultural experience of national community is really a wonderful thing. Is really a very positive thing. And that they are included. Because I think, ultimately, that's what fuels the passion.  I grew up in a farm in Southern Illinois, that's an area that's MAGA hat country. So when I go home, as I sometimes do, and meet my all high school classmates, who are big supporters of the former administration, and they look at me and say, you're in California now. And then their face darkens and say, are you one of those liberals? And I look at them and this came to mind, I don't know why I said this, but it the right thing to say. I said, I'm your old classmate. I'm your old classmate. I'm not something. I'm your old classmate. So I guess the response to something that's very human and personal is a very human and personal response. To reach out to those old classmates. And say, you're included, and I know you're watching television, yours online, you see what looks like a wonderful party that only people on the east coast in the West Coast can take part in. But you're excluded from that party. But you are included. You're part of the party. You're part of this wonderful life and an important part of it. It wouldn't be as good without you. So don't give up. Don't despair. You're still loved. That's a tough message to get across. But I think that's ultimately, really the only one.   SINGH: Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And at this time, I'd like to invite participants to join our conversation. With their questions. We'll do our best to get to as many questions as possible. Krista will now get instructions on how to join the question queue.   OPERATOR: (Gives queuing instructions)   SINGH: Thank you. I'll start with a question that's written from Satpal Singh. He says for those of us operating in local communities and congregations and classrooms, what can we be doing to help combat religious nationalism? How do we ensure that we are protecting ourselves and others from being drawn in by its allure? And how can we be proactive in rooting out religious nationalism in our own communities? So Dr. Karam, I think this might be a good one for you to start with, please.   KARAM: So I think this this resonates very strongly with a question that Professor Juergensmeyer also asked is, how do we free ourselves from this, this space where we've dehumanized one another, but at the same time, we're working together against the other? And I think the issue here is precisely what the message of Religions for Peace has been for the last fifty years. There is no escape from the fact that we have to work together for the other not just for ourselves, as long as we're continuing to work for our own interests, even if our interests are shared. But we're working from the principle of, I need to save my people, or I need to save my family, or I need to save myself that that limited interest per definition will make us draw boundaries. Whereas I think to be honest, I hate to say this, but I think the pandemic is giving us an opportunity to see how incredibly intertwined our basic survival is. It's not just the aspiration to be rich and famous. And then and but it's the basic survival is so incredibly interdependent. That pandemic is telling us this, is showing us this, if we don't seize this opportunity to realize that this is the moment that I serve you, as opposed to serving myself, that this is the moment I defend you, as opposed to only defending myself. That if we don't take that forward, and if that doesn't become our mantra, how do I serve you? How do I insist, be deliberate in serving you? And in other words, in loving you insistently even though you hurt me? How do I insist on serving you? I think if we don't start having that as our mantra collectively, teaching it to our children having this be part of the way that our families serve and operate in any given social context, I think we are going to continue to be sucked into the spaces which are built on the fear of the other as opposed to the love of the other as part of loving ourselves. I believe that's a very fundamental, by the way, every single faith tradition known to humankind, says that. Every single one. Don't tell me Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic! Every single faith tradition says that. Now surely, they can't all be wrong. That's it.   SINGH:  Thank you, Dr. Johnson, please.   JOHNSON: Sure, I would certainly agree with that. And I would add for civic organizations, institutions that are trying to address these problems, they're very important strategies that should, again, should certainly include some things that we've talked about before. Education and dialogue--we should continue those things. But we also have to include things such as engaging with and changing policy. I want to just point again to the securitization role that the way that carceral systems, law enforcement, national security entities are in multiple countries, certainly, including the United States, but globally, are a significant factor and the religious nationalism and targeting religious minorities, and giving religious majority is a platform. So if you are part of a religious community, or civic organization that wants to get involved in addressing religious nationalism, you might include in the work that you do, learning about and engaging with and trying to change the policy around things such as securitization practices, if there are efforts to deprive religious groups who are actually suffering from state persecution, then that's something you can address at the level of how you vote. There are people who are running for office who have a clear set of commitments to ensuring that if if they're able to participate in governance, that they're actually going to address the problem of targeting persecuted minorities. And again, I want to be clear that persecution, for example, does not mean in the United States that you are a white Christian who feels aggrieved. And that you feel like you're being discriminated against as a white Christian, because people don't agree with your vision of the United States, it means that you're actually suffering from a violation of rights. And so I think we just have to clarify that. So engaging with the policy kind of voting that goes on. And then I think, even in terms of the international context, becoming involved in social justice, human rights work, is another way. I think it's important for religious communities to take the opportunity not to romanticize their religious history and their religious identity, but to include in whatever kind of religious education that they're doing engagement with the deep problems of that in ways, for example, that their religious history has participated in depriving others of rights, of inflicting harms upon people. And again, that's should not be seen as attacking your religion. It should be seen as understanding all the range of things that have happened in the past, so that when people are coming to be part of that religious community, what they're getting is not a romanticized view of it. They're getting a very realistic understanding of it so that those opportunities for justice and for solidarity and for coexistence said that Dr. Juergensmeyer and Dr. Karam have articulated can actually flourish.   SINGH: Thank you. And Dr. Juergensmeyer. Would you like to add to that?   JUERGENSMEYER: Yeah, and just to answer my own case that I gave about this guy in Iraq, who used to pal around with Shia, and now that he's become, you know, a hardened ISIS supporter. Well, you know, ISIS is really a movement for Sunni empowerment. And he joined it because he wanted the Sunnis in Mosul in the western part of Iraq to feel like they were included. And Dr. Johnson is absolutely right. This is not just as I indicated a human problem, it certainly is. But it's also a policy problem. Because if the Shia government reached out in a way that dramatically, for example, tried to rebuild Mosul, where it's just destroyed flat like a pancake, and so you have hundreds of thousands of people living out in refugee camps. I've seen them, I've talked with them. The United Nations has done a wonderful job in providing for these refugee camps, but they can't live there forever. So if the Shia government--it is its job, really, to make everybody feel welcome. And if it created those kinds of conditions, then I think there would be a rapid change in the response of the Sunni Arabs. And the same is true in the United States. We think of this, you know, the Christians being the dominant religion, but that's not really true. The dominant culture in the United States is a kind of secular multiculturalism. And at least that's the way it's perceived by the people in my high school back in Southern Illinois.  They don't think of themselves as the majority. They think of themselves as the minority and increasingly so in a country that is becoming visibly more secular and more multicultural. Well, they need to be welcomed, they need to be, we need to reach out to them in a way that they feel like they are part of the party, and not just the unwelcome remnants of the past.   SINGH: Thank you. Krista, I'll pass it to you to answer a, or to involve a live question, please.   OPERATOR: Our next question is a live question from Rich Procida from Bible Study for Progressives.   PROCIDA: Hi. So I'm concerned with the negative definition of politics. Isn't this really the result of the failure of religion to address the important social and political concerns? Isn't the rise of nationalism a failure of religion? And isn't the solution to actually engage those issues as a faith? Not to withdraw into some personal area of personal salvation, but to actually engage as a church, as a community, in social justice, advocacy? And then maybe, one suggestion I made at our breakout group which came up, which I think is pretty good, is that the thing that unifies Americans--I always speak as a progressive Christian and American--is democracy. And isn't that something that we can all rally around? And isn't that anti-theoretical to nationalism?   JOHNSON: I think this is a great point. I we've been talking about politics in ways that I think what you're pointing to is a fair observation that we've made some assumptions and not been precise in our language. This is why I was talking about the racialization of religion as a way of understanding the problem of the intersection because I agree with you, I think that it's if we ask where is there a space that is not political? And what would it look like if religion or anything were to not be involved in any way politically? I don't even know if that's possible. But I'm reminded of in the United States, a civil rights movement was largely criminalized and criticized because it was being political. Here was a group of Black Southern Christians who organize themselves in their own language in order to fight for human rights. And as you just described, who saw their work as necessarily involving the need to change laws because they were trying to fight for social justice. And they were criticized because they we're being political. And what happened was that they actually shifted the way that so many people in the U.S. came to view the relationship between religion and politics, often to different kinds of ends. But I think your point is right. Globally, we've talked, we refer to different kinds of movements that were liberation movements happening within Islam or within Christianity. These have gone on within Judaism, Hinduism, and there's so many examples of this. So I think you make a very important observation. And I would just say we were not being precise in the language. We were referring to the nationalism particularly as a as a problem when you get a certain kind of intersection of religion and politics. But yes, you are right. Not only should people not retreat into some apolitical fear, I'm not sure is humanly possible to live in the world in a way that does not someway become political.   KARAM: Can I also just make a quick point here? I think that exactly as Professor Johnson said, the issue isn't so much that politics is good, and religion is bad, or that religion is good, and politics is bad. That's not the point. The point is that the politicization of religion or the religionization of politics, is a rather toxic equation. And that unless we understand the causes and the roots of the manifestations of this, we will end up finding what is happening now, which is contexts where certain political regimes are making use of religious discourse to justify what is fundamentally actually undemocratic. Because there is no way and there's no—there's not a single context around the world, where a political administration has decided to work with all religions, with all the religions inherent in its boundaries, in order to serve everybody. That's not what's happening. What's happening is that certain political regimes and administrations are working with certain religions in order to marginalize and or to justify the marginalization of certain interest groups. If it indeed was a multi-religious encounter to serve the political administration's interests of serving all we would find ourselves with a radically different political paradigm globally because then it would be every nation for the other. It wouldn't be this nation against that nation, and this race against that race, and this community against this community. The point here is that the alignment between religions, one religion and one political administration is harmful. When the alignment is multi-religious in nature, it is per definition for the welfare of more than one particular group, more than one particular race, more than one particular gender, more than. But that's not what we are seeing and the answer to some of the questions that have been raised before. Again, it's not about religion being good and politics being good or both being bad. It's about how can this administration that we have here, thankfully, how can this administration serve the interests of all, including races, ethnicities, genders, you name it? Well, guess what, not by working with only one religious group or community. Not by working with only one religious organization, or institution, but by working with all of them. Now, having said that, that is the hardest thing to do. The hardest thing to do. You can work with mono interests, you can work with clearly identified paradigms of us and them, it's easy. It's easy to work at even just within the Catholic community sometimes, it's easy. Not really, but just for the sake of argument. My point here is this, political administrations utilize specific religions. And in so doing, either advertently or inadvertently pit them against one another. Learn from the lessons of colonial history. They are plenty, and they are still very pertinent today. Colonialism was about (inaudible) "White Man's Burden." Remember, what was "White Man's Burden?" To bring faith to all people in the dark lens? No, "White Man's Burden" was to bring a certain interpretation of a certain faith to all the so-called "other." That was the problem. And in so doing, it positioned, the different faiths, the different cultural identities, the different ethnicities, and the different races, that positioned them as antagonistic. It was those with us and those against us. That happens when you align with one faith tradition, no matter how beautiful that faith tradition is. No matter how inclusive that faith is. It's still one faith tradition. It's still one faith tradition. And if you look at the variety of work that's been done on religion and development, over time, you will find that many nations, many governments today are indeed supporting religious organizations to do development work globally. But guess what? Each administration is supporting its own religious affiliate to do that work globally. It's not supporting multi religious development. It's not supporting multi religious collaboration. It's supporting specific religions to do their good work in specific parts of the world. That is the wrong formula. And as long as that's the formula, don't tell me good politics and democracy is going to sort that.   SINGH: Thank you. And Dr. Juergensmeyer, would you like to weigh in here?   JUERGENSMEYER: I'm just thinking of, you know, the larger issue about what we can do in our own neighborhood, in our own backyard? What if each church or synagogue or gurdwara adopted another congregation? Like Satpal Singh was saying, who asked the question initially, let me go out on a limb and guess that he's a part of a gurdwara community of Sikhs. What if they adopted a synagogue in their town or another church, and formed a kind of sister relationship between them and the two communities began to meet each other and hang out with each other and to learn from each other? Basically, it's hard to hate people that you don't know. It's hard to hate people you know, it's hard to hate people that you met with and you've learned their lives and you've broken bread with and all of these other things. So maybe it starts just with this kind of human interaction.   SINGH: Thank you. Thank you. The next written question comes from Whit Bodman. This is for you Dr. Johnson. Andrew Whitehead in his work on Christian nationalism found that among Blacks, 31% identified themselves as moderate Christian nationalists, the largest cohort in his four categories. Obviously, they are not white supremacists. This suggests that there are different kinds of Christian nationalism. Do you see this Christian nationalism as problematic, as dangerous as acceptable? And perhaps an acceptable part of the diverse fabric of America?   JOHNSON: And thanks so much for the question. I think it's a really important one and glad to answer. The quick answer is that it's problematic because this is religious nationalism. Whether these are white Christians, or Black Christians, or Latinx Christians, and they're important examples of how harmful this is. So one of the things that we we've not talked so much about are the African religions that have suffered persecution, Candomblé in Brazil, for example, which the adherents of Candomblé are particularly Black, but there is a new wave of charismatic Christianity that has targeted Candomblé as a diabolical religion. And many of these people are, of the Christians who were targeting Candomblé, are Black Christians, who see the presence of an African-derived religion as a form of Satanism, and the influence of the devil that needs to be eradicated. Or in Nigeria, which is a Black country, Yoruba, an indigenous African religion, has suffered targeted persecution and desecration by at the hands of Black Christians who believe that Nigeria should be a Christian nation. And there's also contention with Muslims as well who are fighting over the identity of Nigeria, but who particularly have targeted Yoruba as a as a diabolical religion. And in the United States, you're pointing to the statistic of black Christians who identified nationals we see this, for example, and the very harmful and unfortunate targeting in Christian nationalism, in the U.S. on trans youths, for example, transgender youths, so targeting these young people, as transgender has become a center stage platform for expounding a Christian nationalist agenda that wants to employ religious doctrine of a particular nature. So there is no one Christian doctrine on sexuality or anything else or gender on anything else, Christians disagree, but this movement asserts that it is the Christian truth that is anti-trans, and that's multiracial. You can find Black Christians who are a part of that. So the result would be that as we just as we were saying the fight over right now that trans youth would not be able to get medical services that they need at the discretion or judgment of medical experts, it would be based on anti-trans religious bias. And so those are just examples of the very harmful effects of the religious nationalism. So it doesn't matter what the racial population is. It is about the outcomes and the strategies and whether or not they're harmful. So those are just examples.   SINGH: Thank you, Dr. Johnson. The next written question comes from Katherine Marshall. She says what would be your counsel to the U.S. Biden administration? As some practical policy steps in the area of religion, symbolic actions, more pragmatic things removed from the table? What would you say?   KARAM: I actually already answered, Professor Marshall, who's my mentor, by the way, and someone I have a tremendous amount of admiration and respect for, it's really not rocket science. It is about working deliberately with all religious communities at all times to serve everybody. It is not about giving the bulk of the resources available to any one religious organization or one religious community, no matter how dynamic and fantastic its range of services around the world is. It is about quintessentially essentially having the basic religious literacy to understand that working deliberately, determinately, and systematically with all religious groups and communities and organizations, that that is the way to make a difference to serve everybody. Now that skill by the way of working with everybody is not born overnight. And it's certainly not going to be born overnight in any particular U.S. administration or any particular political administration. That's why there are multi religious organizations that have existed since 1850 that deal with this work. But are they on the horizon? Are they anywhere on the horizon, USAID just had a beautiful, remarkable event trying to look at impact of religious collaboration just last year. Noteworthy is who was not invited to that space, in spite of having tremendous experience and resilience and experience over decades. I'm sorry, political administrations, no matter who they are, are not particularly known to be inclusive in their outreach and in the skills of understanding what it is like to work multi religiously, all it takes is identifying who the multi religious actors are, where there is a track record of multi religious advocacy and service delivery, both not just one and working with those organizations to support them. I would like to see the Biden administration recognize Religions for Peace, recognize the Parliament of World Religions, recognize United Religions Initiative. So far, it has not. And I wonder why they're all based here.   JUERGENSMEYER: Yeah, I think that I agree with Dr. Karam, that would be a good approach. But I think there's also something really much more fundamental, and that is returned to America stand as a leader for human rights around the world, in all areas. Because I think that taking a very strong policy on human rights and joining that with our political and in particular, our weapons sales and other aspects of America's interaction with other countries, that human rights would become an important factor. And the treatment of religious communities, minority communities, of course, would be a very strong element of that not the only element. I mean, the treatment of gays and transgenders, and other disenfranchised ethnic communities will also be a part of the human rights agenda, whether there is a kind of autocracy that deprives of basic freedom, all those are part of the human rights agenda. But certainly that would then encompass the treatment of minority religious communities. I think that's so important. And this administration, I think, to its credit, has begun to make statements in exactly this direction. And I hope that this will continue. And that, once again, America will be seen as a leading light for human rights around the world and willing to put its money where its mouth is. Willing to stand behind these positions with its support, whether it's political or monetary, or military or whatever. We don't engage with countries that deprive people of their human rights. That is a stand I think would make a huge difference, for not only for minority religious communities, but for those who are disenfranchised from human rights around the world.   SINGH: Thank you. And over to you, Dr. Johnson. Do you have anything you'd like to add here?   JOHNSON: Yeah, I think that there certainly needs to be much more deliberate commitment to engaging with the variety of liberation struggles and the fight for justice happening globally. I would differ somewhat from some of the other panelists over human rights. The United States is overthrown multiple democracies around the world, including (inaudible), we to this day operate black sites where we torture people. We incarcerate a greater percentage of our population than any other country on Earth and we are investing even more heavily in repressive strategies. We have militarized our policing. The way it operates is actually very murderous for Black and brown communities. That's not the case for white communities. And so this is why I said earlier that, in the West, we have a discourse about judging countries based on human rights. But we don't actually judge countries based on the human rights for all peoples, we are doing that based on majority populations. We're not paying attention to how countries are treating minority populations. And we do that based on the history of Western colonialism. So I do think that we have to fight for human rights. But I think that if you make a list of the actual violations of human rights, and you make a list of the countries that are violating those human rights, I don't know--the United States would not be on the list of countries that is not severely violating human rights. Okay. We wouldn't be and I don't know what country would be on that list. We'd need a different kind of calculus. And so I don't think that means that we shouldn't fight for human rights, we do. But you can look at our policy with regard to Saudi Arabia, or Israel, or European states, and see that it's a contradiction. You know, we pick and choose. We pick our partners, and we agree with them whenever they do things that are in violation, often that we're funding, or when we do things that ourselves in violation of human rights. So we do need to fight for human rights. We do need standards around it, that I agree with. But the binary list that we have right now is really based on colonialism, race, and it does not take seriously the way minorities are treated by these nation states. So I think that for the Biden administration certainly have a very different approach, I think that we could start with radically changing our securitization practices. When I say radically, I mean that we start from the ground up and recognize that we have spent billions of dollars, and we have spent, we have built lots of infrastructure, to unfairly target Muslims as a threat to the United States. We've done that within the United States, and we've done that outside of the United States. We maintain a great relationship with India, even though they're violating the rights of Muslims. We maintain a great religious relationship with Israel. We won't even call for them to stop an air raid against civilian Palestinians right now--we won't do it, not publicly. You know, Biden wants to get on the phone and have a private conversation. But if there were a different population of people who were on the receiving end of those bombs, or if a different country were doing it, it would be different, right? So I think that we have to have a much more honest and inclusive approach to this. I think we need to support everyone's human rights; it should not matter who they are, it shouldn't matter what their race is, it shouldn't matter what their religion is, it should not matter where they live, we have to support everyone's human rights.   KARAM: And it might begin—forgive me, forgive me—it might begin with a little bit of humility, about the fact that human rights in this country still have a long way to go. We cannot at any moment in time claim to go and serve and judge anyone else out there, when our own pain exceeds our boundaries and spills over everywhere. In this country, there are human rights violations of the most egregious degree, let's name it, please. And a little bit of humility about that might have been what would have salvaged the previous Democratic administration because it wasn't a very humble one either. I think just that humility to understand that human rights begins right here. And to be examples and paragons of virtue right here before we decide to serve others will help us build the bridges we need to build for human rights with others. But where can I extend the hand when it is cut off? And how dare I think that I can extend the hand and understand the other way in my in my own home, in my own territory, in my own neighbor, I will see a sign that tells me that hatred is okay?   JUERGENSMEYER: Human rights begins at home.   KARAM: Exactly.   SINGH: Thank you. Thank you all, I think this is a very powerful note to end on. Dr. Johnson, Dr. Juergensmeyer, Dr. Karam, thank you for joining us in this discussion and sharing your insights and your wisdom with us.

KIM:  Thank you. Greetings, I'm Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, an organization that connects forty denominations and scores of Christian institutions and ministry. I'm delighted to be part of this conversation on the religion community's role in managing COVID-19. And along with me, as conversation partners, are Reverend Jacqui Lewis, senior minister for public theology and transformation at Middle Church in New York City. She is an author and activist preacher, public theologian, working particularly in the areas of racial justice, but also seeing the church as a place for social transformation. And with us, also is Melissa Rogers, executive director at the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. A role that she held previously with distinction and now has renewed. Melissa is not only an expert on religion in America, but she is also supremely capable leader to bring together people from various segments of society to address our country's greatest needs and possibilities. So, Jacqui, Melissa, thank you for joining in this conversation.   ROGERS AND LEWIS:  Delighted to be here. Thank you.   KIM:  Well, let's begin with the big picture of how religious communities have managed COVID-19. What are some notable themes, whether they're challenges or responses, whether they're strengths or weaknesses, in the religion community's responses? What are some of these themes that stand out to you from this past year?   ROGERS:  Well, yes, great. And thank you, Walter, it's great to be with you. And great to be with Jacqui, I want to thank you both for the tremendous work that you do on behalf of your own faith communities, and for everyone in the United States and around the world, your compassionate voices mean so much. And I also want to thank the Council on Foreign Relations, and Irina and her wonderful team for teeing up this dialogue. So, some of the themes that come to mind immediately for me, are themes like resilience, ingenuity, and compassion. When this pandemic hit, we had to, and religious communities, had to adapt. And so quickly, we think about in our, if we take ourselves back to the pre-pandemic mindset, it would have been almost unthinkable that religious communities would have had to turn on a dime and celebrate Easter, and Passover, and Ramadan, not in the traditional ways, but online, and outdoors, and in other ways. And that all the service that faith communities do to help people in need, would have to be radically adapted, not only because of the contagiousness of the disease, but also because of the growing number of people who had lost their lives and livelihoods. And  that makes us think, of course, of all the loss of life and how chaplains and ministers like you and Jacqui and so many others, have found ways, new ways, to minister to people, when the old ways  could not happen because of the disease.   So those are themes that hit me, right off the bat. And I'm just so thankful for what the faith community has done to adapt, and to show compassion in new ways.  A couple of other themes that come to my mind are revelation and reckoning. This virus has revealed to us, for example, racial disparities in a way that perhaps some of us had never seen before. It was so clear, I think, that no one could deny it. And that has meant that we have had to have a reckoning. And as a result, equity has come into the center of the conversation, both racial equity and equity for those who  have been underserved or disempowered in a variety of ways. And I think that has been a good turn in the conversation. One of the things I've mentioned is the Equity Task Force that the Biden administration has put in place along with the COVID response team. And I think that leadership and leadership in the faith community in particular in this area has launched a new conversation. And that has been all to the good.   LEWIS:  Thank you, Melissa, for those reflections. I wanted to dovetail into this idea of resilience and maybe even to put resistance in that. I think faith communities across denominations and across Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, I think I've seen my colleagues across the nation really show the ways love, revolutionary love, has no bounds. The way that it is not a tied to brick and mortar, it is not tied to place, but it's tied to heart. So, I had a chance to do media with Rabbi Sharon Brous, for example, in LA, right when the pandemic hit. Of course she was pivoting Passover, we were pivoting Easter, and our annual revolutionary web conference. Just the ways that our lay leaders are so creative, and our staff are so creative, how people turned to Zoom rooms into places of community and art, and justice, and love, that even in the midst of this pandemic—at Middle Church in particular, we were able to host a conference for 650 people last year and 1300 this year, more this year, Melissa and Walter—350 people joined the church during COVID.   So I think there was, again, across the nation across denominations, ways that faith leaders found to tap into creativity, to art, to community organizing, to protesting, to voter reform—look what we did in the elections during COVID. The way that we organized ourselves to learn issues, to share, to share resources, the Poor People's Campaign, Vote Common Good, just some of the allies that we work with. So that, yeah, I think resilience. And when I say resistance, I mean, sort of, resisting also, the fires that were burning, right? We had a tough year, not just with COVID, but the George Floyd murder, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, all of these moments of kind of racial crisis, the rising violence against Asian communities. We also, as faith communities, resisted oppression, resisted violence, and resisted racism, and actually bound ourselves, I think, together in an interfaith and multi-ethnic, multi-gendered movement for justice. And so I'm really proud of that.  And I would say maybe one more thing, not to be polemic, but to say, in some places, faith pretended that the pandemic wasn't real, okay. In some places, faith-based leaders gave their folks a sense that wearing a mask or distancing from one another was against faith, that if God was real and good that we wouldn't have to do that. And I struggled to understand that, I just want to make sure I say that out loud, to understand how responsible we are, for the ways our congregants take in information through the lens of faith leaders who they trust, and how powerful that is, right? And how important it is that we steward that power well.   KIM:  I've heard words—resilience, resistance, engagement, creativity. And I sense that the work of the NAE  face very similar issues. And, we've been seeking to engage in a few different ways. One is to inform. And so very early on, getting information out there, not only about the nature of this virus, but also about responses and—Jacqui, to your point, getting good information that puts it, not only in medical terms, but also in theological terms—medicine as a gift from God, the kind of creativity that was required to engage with worship service that both of you have mentioned, and in some ways, this has been a remarkable moment of entrepreneurial spirit within churches, spirit-led creativity that I would wish to highlight. But it's been complicated, right? And so, we've not only had to inform, but we've had to collaborate on a variety of issues, not only the medical issues, but the racial justice issues, and certainly as an Asian-American, I sense deeply the recent turns that really are revelation of long standing issues, that perhaps in the Asian-American, Pacific Islander community have been more silently endured.   But there's a moment of reckoning, another word that you all have used, that require not just information, but collaboration, and not just collaboration, but the third thing that, I think, at the NAE that we've been seeking to do is engagement, of actually participating, not just talking and building alliances, and developing this sense of solidarity, but engaging and becoming vaccinations sites at churches, or engaging with advocacy issues that deal with Black and Brown communities that have been disproportionately impacted. So, I sense, along with you, both this creative moment, but also challenging moment. And now I want to dive more specifically in why and how religious communities are particularly important to our national response to COVID. And by COVID, I'm not just meaning the virus, physical virus, but I mean, this whole last year and what has been revealed in our social settings. So why and how are religious communities so particularly important in our national response? Jacqui, let's begin with you.   LEWIS:  Sure. I mean, we're essential workers, right? Religious communities are essential workers. I mean, here is this global, devastating pandemic, that claims hundreds of thousands of lives, I think they're now putting the number at 900,000 here. And I think the role of faith communities is to, is to help our people theologically understand, ethically understand that we're a global community. I think, Walter and Melissa, about the word of “ubuntu,” this philosophy in South Africa. “I am who I am because you are who you are.” A person is a person through other people. The word for humanity in the Zulu language is actually this word, that is more than one, like there's more than one of us, and that we are inextricably connected one to the other. So I think religion, the word religion, you and I know, means to bind together, like to re-tie, right, to bind together, that the world of the world of religions and faith communities is vital, to help us understand that what happens in India affects us in America. What happens in China affects us in America. In particular, I want to say, the traffic and the ethic of revolutionary love—revolutionary love as an ethic to guide our lives. And there's this way in which what COVID showed us all is Black and Brown people die first—are most devastated. In fact, whole generations of Latinx, Hispanic men are actually lost to COVID. The ones who are on the frontlines, the one who are in the bodega jobs, the ones who drive the taxis, the ones who drive the Ubers. So there's an economic reality that faith communities can help people understand—that our economy, if our economy is going to be God's economy, how do we think about paying people more who work less? How do we—who work in these frontline jobs? How do we think about paid leave for moms and dads? How do we think about a living wage? How do we think about giving, making sure that everybody has healthcare? All those economic issues show themselves to us. Along with, again, the racial issues show themselves to us. We found out that we've not overcome, we've not overcome the way caste and race cause us to oppress one another. And I think those of us who do theology have an urgent responsibility to teach our congregants, to teach our faith leaders, the oneness of God, the many languages God speaks, the value that God has on all human life. The way that we are one people called to one, one hope, one ethic, and I think that we not only have a responsibility, we have an urgent calling, to make sure that these theologies of welcome, these theologies of love and justice become like air we breathe, and not so much caught in creed, and culture.   KIM:  Melissa, your job is to get faith communities engaged. So I imagine you have a lot of why’s and how’s.   ROGERS:  There are some why’s and how’s, yes. One of the things that I think has become even more clear during this period, is that because of the role that faith plays in our country, religious leaders and faith-based organizations are vital to public health. And you don't have to be a person of faith necessarily to see that, and let me just talk through one example. When we were thinking about early on getting facts to people about the virus and the vaccination, and you reference this, Walter, and also Jacqui as well, we knew that working with faith communities was going to be essential. It wasn't a choice. It was something that had to happen in order to effectively meet people across the country and around the world. And some of the reasons for that are just very factual. Houses of worship are pervasive, and they're familiar to many Americans. Religious leaders are among the most trusted figures in our communities, and vast majority of religious leaders are enthusiastic about helping, and one of the great bright spots of this has been that, for the most part, this has brought faith communities together, and saying, we can work on this together, we may differ on some other issues, but we can work together here. And that's been great. This love your neighbor moment has brought us together. We know that people have fears and anxieties, questions that need to be answered. And we know that when they see someone they trust getting the vaccine, talking about the facts here, that that can really change their willingness to get the vaccine. And that matters a lot.   We also know that many faith groups are exceptionally good at reaching underserved communities. And that matters a great deal. We also know that houses of worship are often gap fillers for a lack of culturally-sensitive healthcare. They help people you know with language barriers or with information barriers or other kinds of access barriers, for example, many minority groups and immigrants. And so it's just shot into the public recognition, I think, that faith communities are absolutely central to public health, including to this virus but not limited to this virus. And I think one of the things that has happened is, as we recognize the importance of the connection between faith communities and public health, it helps us perhaps, to think more intentionally and productively moving forward, about how we might strengthen those connections that have been built, because we'll face other challenges in the future and we want to make sure we're ready. So one thing I'm really grateful for is that President Biden has understood this from the very beginning. And he was very clear that we should be working with faith communities of all kinds, and indeed, has himself visited pop-up vaccination clinics at a chapel recently, and has always taken a great interest in this. So it's a great moment, I think, to think about how the government works with faith communities in a way that respects church-state separation, and religious liberty for everyone, and partners on shared goals, and make sure that no one is left behind.   LEWIS:  Well, I've got a couple of what and how’s to share that Melissa prompts me to want to bring to the table, if it's okay. I find myself shy about some of the things that have happened at Middle Church, but the collegiate church, my colleague at Fort Washington Church is an inoculation site now, and that's just amazing. There are four churches, if you will, that share one ministry. But at Middle, we decided to take 10 percent of our budget last year, Melissa, to make it for council. So how can we help people to stay in their houses? How can we help people pay their bills? How can we help people get groceries on the table? When the virus first hit, our deacons took food to families that were getting sick and delivered them on the doorsteps. We made a whole website about resources that were available in the community. Here's what we learned from the CDC. And let's put, so literally a one-stop shop for information. And then my colleague, Amanda, bless her heart, started a cadre of volunteers who stood in line to make vaccine appointments. So the older folks, who, like me, if we're not trying to be on the phone a long time, getting these young people just would keep refreshing their phones, and got inoculations for so many of the vulnerable people in our community, including me. My husband and I got vaccinated because someone stood in line for us. So information—we took selfies of ourselves getting shots. One of our members is a doctor, physician, an immunologist, actually, did a teach-in that we call “The Freedom Lab.” So education, trust that it works because we did it. Here's where you can get it. Here's some groceries. Here's some resources to get you through these tough times. And it made the whole community feel like we were doing wellness.   ROGERS:  Wow. Walter, if you don't mind—Jacqui, thank you so much for saying all that and much more importantly for doing that work and leading it which is just vital to people's life and their livelihoods. And one of the things I just want to mention is that Jacqui's example points out two things. One is just incredible heart that's put into this work and compassion. And secondly, how people of faith and community organizations are often the middlemen and women between government and people who need services. So people of faith and other community groups, they know how to reach government, and they know how to get information about what benefits are available, and what services, and at the same time, they know how to reach people who are struggling. And so that very important role, of that middle person role, is just what explains why these initiatives are so very important. And I think there's so much more we can do in this space by taking some of the best practices that NAE, and Jacqui, and Middle Church have done, and others, that it really makes me excited to think about how we can build on all your really great work.   KIM:  There's a tremendous kind of collaborative spirit that's developed as a result of this challenge. And, of course, there are moments of fragmentation, we are human. And despite the call to shared humanity, there is a streak of obstinance in all humans. But, by and large, I have entered into all sorts of conversations I don't think I would have had otherwise. Tomorrow night, I'll be with bBlackdoctors.org, in a collaborative event, a multi-racial approach to this challenge of vaccination. And these are relationships and partnerships, these are collaborations that maybe would not have existed. But the new kinds of friendships that develop from this, hold a promise far beyond this pandemic. They are friendships, they are relationships, that could be leveraged for other sorts of social challenges in the future, that the faith community could be using this as an occasion, not just to solve a problem of this past year, but to engage with problems in the coming years that beset us. And the kinds of work that we've been doing in webinars to get better information out there. In opportunities to say your organization has a strength that ours doesn't.   So at the NAE we collaborated with the Ad Council and faith leaders in Black and Brown communities to produce ads that the NAE—we could not have produced. But the Ad Council, that's their job, that's their expertise, and to be able to use that in the collaborative effort to get information out, but distributed in these trusted places. Both of you talked about the church as being this trusted, localized, trusted place. And these are very powerful issues, because, you know, if we're going to address issues of racial justice, yes, they'll be national conversations, but they're going to be localized efforts that need to move the needle for change, the conversations on the local level. So this has been very heartening for us to broach these opportunities together. Both of you have mentioned vaccination in some way, shape, or form. And now I want to turn our attention to this. Can you give us a quick snapshot of where we are, in this pandemic right now? Your current work, especially in the area of vaccination, whether it's being a vaccination site, or other things that you're seeking to do to address the multifaceted challenges of vaccination. So give us a snapshot of what you're doing right now and where you see we need to be going in the next weeks to come. Melissa, why don't we begin with you to start.   ROGERS:  Okay. Sure. Yeah, well, so this week has been a landmark week, as the President announced more than 60 percent of people eighteen years and older have received at least one dose of the vaccination. Cases have continued to decrease, hospital admissions are down, deaths, thank God, are down, and we're vaccinating between about 1.5 to 2 million people per day. So I think we are winning the war against the virus, but the battle is not done. There is an incredible amount of work ahead of us, particularly this summer. The President has set a goal that 70 percent of the country's adults will have at least one vaccination shot by July 4, and 160 million Americans will be fully vaccinated by July 4. And in that regard, I’d just like to mention, if I could, several things that, and I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I hope that we can all redouble our efforts this summer and just want to mention a few resources that you can take advantage of, some of which are new. One is vaccines.gov, to help people find a location near them where they can be vaccinated. They can also text their zip code to 438829, that's 4388292, to find a vaccination near them. There's an 800 number that they can call. And also, we're having a Digital Day of Action this Friday, May 21. And we'll be sure that everyone who's on the call receives materials about that, that could be as simple as posting your own vaccination story. And  linking to vaccines.gov, for example. It could be something like joining the COVID-19 Community Corps that I know so many of you are a part of, where you receive new resources that you can share with your community, because we're finding we really have to go where people are, we have to meet them where they are, wherever that is, and make sure that we're telling personal stories, talking to our friends, our family, and others who may have some hesitancy here to make sure that their questions get answered. And they're assisted in getting vaccinated. So I think we're doing well. There's reasons to be optimistic. But at the same time, I'd ask everybody to redouble their efforts as we move forward during these important coming weeks to make sure that we can return to many of the things that we enjoy so much, including gathering in our houses of worship in person safely.   LEWIS:  That's great, Melissa, thank you so much for all of that information. Maybe I'm going to be anecdotal at this moment to just say both the kind of, “yay, we're doing it,” and the challenge, right. The way we're doing it is, again, just to thank my colleagues at Middle Church, who've been collaborating across the city. Yes, to make sure that we got the information on the website, yes, to make sure that we got inoculations for our most vulnerable people, our young people are going. I was talking to a mom the other day who said I'm sitting here, my boy’s inoculated now, second shot for her sixteen-year-old, and she was brilliant and joyful, and thanking God, that this is available now so that their family can get somewhere back to normal. I was at my church a little while ago today doing fire work, we burned down in December. And one of my security guards has not been inoculated. And so I say as a pastor, my job is I'm saying to everyone, have you got your shot? Have you had your vaccinations? 70 percent of our staff is inoculated now, and I want a 100 percent inoculation by October. So when we open up, our staff can model, “yes, we've done this thing.” Here's the anecdote of the resistance, this security person—sorry to tell on you, friend. “I did not get inoculations. I was a soldier. They gave us immunotherapy when I was in Afghanistan. I don't think I need a shot.” Come on. That doesn't seem really true. Who's putting that information out? Who's still resisting? And I understand this, Black peoples’ bodies have been sites of terror around medicine, around experiments, around eugenics in the time of Reconstruction. All of our listeners don't know that. But it's true. So there can be a kind of, “can we trust this?”   So Dr. Meghan Kirksey, who's our member, who did a class for us, is an African-American mom of three girls, who said, the most reliable witness, Walter and Melissa, is you. We are the most reliable witness. So to the ones who are listening, you read the information, you got the data from the places that Melissa said, you had your inoculation. And then when you turn to your family or your community, and you testify to that you felt better. And yes, that second one was rough, but I did it. We're our best eyewitness, is what I really believe about the power of the inoculations. And the importance of still masking and distancing while everybody gets safe and well. So I'm wanting to encourage religious communities, can I be honest? To not be afraid, to expect that, to articulate that as a norm, to make a reopen protocol, that you, that with physicians and lawyers in your community, that your community owns, so that people can together hold the norm of what it's going to look like to be in community together—we're going to gather this way, we're going to gather this way, we're not going to gather this way, so everybody owns it with the most vulnerable in mind. And I think that that's what's going to get us to President Biden's goals and to all of our goals, of a kind of a well community. Seriously loving each other enough to get shots and stay distant until we do.   KIM:  Jacqui, early on, you talked about revolutionary love, and this kind of ethic of love that ought to drive us in terms of this vaccination. It's not simply about personal protection. But it's an engagement of protection for the community at large and a reengagement. Speaking as not only president of the NEA, but as a local pastor, reengagement of all that church represents. The breaking of bread together, the studying of the Bible in small groups, the being on mission in our neighborhoods, sending short-term mission teams overseas in different contexts to help out, I mean all the myriads of ways that the church represents an opportunity of service. And this is true of other faith traditions as well. And it's in part why I joined with the COVID Community Corps and recently put out a Trusted Voices video with the Department of Health and Human Services that followed me around as I got my second vaccination shot, and one of the most compelling things about that second vaccination shot for me was to see the people gathered there. I mean, there were National Guardsmen who were doing the registration and welcoming us. There were a whole slew of nurses coming in, some retired and others making the extra effort putting extra hours in, and then the line of people I mean, men, women, old, young, racial diversity, ethnic diversity represented in the line as I was standing, waiting to get my shot. And it really was the sense that we can do this. And we are doing this. And it really does take everyone. And that's a very compelling vision of what America could be. And in its better moments, really is, but we need to continue to persist in this. Now I know that there are a number of questions that are starting to come in and others that wait to be asked. So I want to invite Liz Powell to come back on to help navigate this transition to our Q&A section.   OPERATOR:  We'll take the first live question from Munir A. Shaikh with the Bayan Claremont Islamic Graduate School. Please accept the unmute now prompt.   It appears we are having some technical difficulties.   We will take a written question then from Katherine Marshall of Georgetown University.   “American religious communities, including interreligious bodies, have many transnational links. What concrete steps can and should these communities take to address the global challenges posed by COVID? What are priorities you see in the most meaningful areas for concrete action?”   ROGERS:  Great. And thank you so much, Katherine Marshall, who does such great work on these issues, both in the United States and around the world, and so grateful for her and for all of her contributions. So I wanted to just note, that this week, the President reaffirmed his commitment to leading an international and coordinated vaccination effort, announcing that the United States will donate 80 million U.S. vaccines to  people around the world, and will continue to use our leadership with our G7 partners, the EU, COVAX, and others to coordinate a multilateral effort focusing on ending the pandemic. Now, this effort is multifaceted and will continue, and faith and community groups can play key roles in this effort as well, as Katherine notes. One of the things that we were doing earlier this week is talking with Administrator Samantha Power at USAID about helping to get shots in arms not just in the United States, but around the world, in part by working with faith and community groups. And so I would say that one of the best first steps you could take if you're interested in ramping up your work, or if you want to tell us more about the work you're doing in this area, would be to connect with our Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at USA, and let us know that you're interested, we are beginning to ramp up our strategies in that area, and to make sure that we know what's already going on, and build on those efforts. So I think, I would recommend that as an excellent first step, either telling us what you're doing, or raising your hand, or both things to say, I want to do more to help around the world, because this is absolutely a key mission for us, both in terms of the moral mission, and also the safety mission, the virus knows no borders. And we won't all be safe until we are all safe. So let's make sure that we lean into this. And I'm just really thrilled by the question and the excitement that we've already seen among faith and community partners about getting this job done all around the world.   KIM:  Let me add to that, within the NAE, I've mentioned that there are forty plus denominations and scores of Christian institutions, ministries, nonprofits. Some of our denominations that have a much larger footprint globally than they do within America itself, and there's eager conversation about what does it look like to be a partner to the global community. And then of course, we have Christian ministries like World Relief, World Vision, Compassion International, that work very diligent—Salvation Army, very diligently, globally in terms of providing healthcare, and they're already trusted voices, resources, known entities within communities throughout the world. And they have expertise in exactly this area of medical health, that's also in partnership with religious communities that have an extraordinary level of trust. So in some ways, as I look at the work of the NAE, our connections globally, are not only as significant, but perhaps even more significant, given the specific organizations like World Relief that I've mentioned, that their job is, in fact, in this area of addressing the most vulnerable throughout the world, in a holistic way, both in terms of mind, and body, in terms of spirit, individually, and in community. So there's a rich opportunity. I'm excited to hear about some of these initiatives from the administration, because they're rich opportunities for collaboration, not only nationally, but internationally.   LEWIS:  Can I just say a brief thing there really quickly, to say, what happened in this time of COVID is that all of us developed more digital connections than we had before. So your web includes your mother's cousin's auntie, right, who lives in Paris, or your father's best friend who lives in China. So to maybe use, to take advantage of that to  invite the people in your community, to be in touch across the globe, to tell stories, to collect stories, to tell share best resources, and pick a few people that you trust to follow and follow them where they go. So Valarie Kaur is a Sikh activist, author, but who helped us all get in touch with this catastrophic COVID death rates in India. So, To India With Love is a campaign that's up and about now, you can make a donation or you can read and learn. Pick a few people to follow across ethnicity, across religion, and stay in touch with that and help build your own web of connectivity.   KIM:  Thank you. Liz, Let's move to the next question.   OPERATOR:  We will take the next live question from Tom Getman of The Getman Group, former Senate staffer, and World Vision International director. Please accept the unmute now prompt.   GETMAN:  Thanks, friends, you make us all proud. And we're very grateful for your comments today. Could you comment please about the amazing engagement between Black Lives and Asian Lives Matter with international issues? I'm segueing off what you just talked about. It's been so interesting to see their relationship with Palestinian Liberation. Our liberation leaders here and in South Africa have mentioned if even one person or group lacks freedom, we all lack freedom and liberation. That's particularly true, I think, in the COVID crisis. What can we do as faith communities to help? We're going to a different level here to help oppressed people in refugee camps or in really marginalized areas to be freed from this fear and oppression of not being inoculated, like the Palestinians or the Uighurs, or the religious minorities in many places. Thanks very much for your help in this.   KIM:  Jacqui, you want to give us an initial thought, given your work in some of these spaces?   LEWIS:  Thank you, Walter. I was just pondering like, what would one want to say quickly? I mean, I think one of the things, thank you so much for that question. What you're asking about, this leads us to the intersectionality of these issues. We all know that they're connected, we know that we're inextricably connected. We know that race connects to class, connects to healthcare, connects to economic justice, connects to sexuality and gender, connects to region. And we also know, we also have a sense that a common opponent, I'll say it that way, a common opponent for all of us, is racism, and white supremacy, and entitlement. And that is a common opponent to our Asian siblings, who are now, I can't even believe the violence being enacted upon them. I find myself thinking, if an African American person is violating an Asian person, Walter, to be just blunt, I feel like what Kool-Aid has that Black person drunk, right? What have they taken in to make them pass on the oppression? Do you feel what I mean? There's a common opponent. And so what do we do together, we say to ourselves, we're not going to buy the hype that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization. We're going to find a Black Lives Matter chapter to connect to no matter our race. And if not that, white folks can connect to SURJ, who's really gathering anti-racist work with whites. We know that the AAPI community is connecting now deeply to the Black Lives Matter community.   If you look for anti-AAPI hatred group websites and find your way into that relationship, again, the interweb has connected all of us, so I think it's both national and international, but deeply local, and Google is your friend, and we'll get you to a place that feels safe. And maybe what you want to do, loves, is to set up a conversation group among ethnic folks and white folks in your setting. Whether you're a church, or a parachurch, or a synagogue, or a mosque—in your community, what kinds of conversation groups can you set up to read, to learn, to study about the underlying conditions, I'm going to call them the pre-existing conditions, that lead us to this place of violence in this place of deep sickness.   ROGERS:  Walter, I know you as well as Jacqui have done such great work in this space. And I just wondered if you wanted to comment on the question as well.   KIM:  Yeah. There's a very complicated immigration history for Asian Americans. And so even this notion of AAPI as a unitary movement is something of an illusion, because the immigration pattern has been so varied. And unlike African American situation, or the Hispanic Latino situation, there isn't a unifying language. So not only is there not a unifying history, but within the Hispanic community, predominantly speaking Spanish. And with an African American community, most people are not asking, well, where were you originally from? What country? You don't think to ask that. But when you talk about the AAPI community, you're talking about scores and scores of languages, cultures that have some similarity and overlap, but also a number of distinct qualities. And then, what does collaboration and unity look like when the Vietnamese experience is different from the Malay experience, is different from the Chinese or Korean experience, and the languages are different and so forth. And yet their common experiences of race or disempowerment, even among those who might fit the model minority  stereotype, and I point at myself in this way, but here's a moment of solidarity, to Jacqui's point. There are some profoundly shared experiences that point to opportunities of mutual understanding and work. But we need to hear those stories. And they are very difficult conversations because some of those stories include difficult experiences between racial and ethnic minorities, not just between the dominant culture, and racial and ethnic minorities. And that just adds a layer of complexity.   But there have also been very beautiful moments of solidarity. And I point to a documentary that recently just brought me to tears, Far East Deep South, I would highly recommend it to those of you who are listening, a Chinese immigrant family’s discovery that they actually weren't immigrants, but had a heritage in Mississippi. And that journey of discovery included a journey of discovery of the solidarity between the African American and Chinese American communities in Mississippi. Was a beautiful, compelling, but at times painful, narrative. We need to hear these stories, we need to engage in that if we are to move together. Seems aspirational, but it is, in fact, possible. And, lives gets transformed, communities get transformed, when we engage in these difficult conversations with one another. And we hear our stories, and we move forward together in a way that would not be possible if we were not really attending to each other's stories. That's a bit of a pastor coming out of me this moment, but—   LEWIS:  I think that what you're saying, Walter, causes us to think also about the multiethnic possibilities in our faith communities that sadly still elude us. Eleven o'clock in the morning is still often way more segregated than I think our faith calls to, in that context. And so, Middle's a multi-all-the-things church: multiethnic, multiracial, multiclass, multigendered. But when we are together in that community, the aunties that got violated are not like our grandmothers, they are our grandmothers. Right. But the, and so I think there's an opportunity, Melissa and Walter, right now, for us to think about multicultural, multiethnic systems as antidotes to hate and violence.   KIM:  We have several more questions. So I know that we should be pushing on to address those. Liz?   OPERATOR:  We will take the next written question from Tabassum Haleem, with the Islamic Networks Group, and it's directed to Melissa.   “Thank you for your leadership and continuously providing faith-based institutions new tools to better serve their communities and combating COVID-19. Do you see increased collaboration among interfaith groups? And do you see future opportunities for cooperative initiatives? If so, do you have any specific examples?”   ROGERS:  Great. Thank you so much. And I appreciate the question and your work. Yes, I think the answer is a resounding positive one. There have been so many instances in which we have seen groups of different faiths and beliefs come together to work against this virus, one that I would lift up is the Coalition Faiths for Vaccines, which has a national summit next week on May 26. And that is a well-timed national summit, and the work of this group has really been spectacular, and so inspirational. I've been a part of their meetings many times and they include people of so many different faiths, I couldn't even recite all the different groups, it sort of, I think covers the landscape, of the religious landscape, I should say, of the United States. And they have worked together very intentionally, to make sure that people have the tools and the understanding to plug in and help with this problem. And I think in the course of doing so, efforts like this are not only helping us to become more physically healthy, but to actually heal our nation in other ways too, because they are helping to build bridges across differences, as we've all just talked about, to show solidarity and to find new ways to work together that maybe we would not have found if we hadn't had to face this challenge together.   So I think, that's just one example, I know ING has done a lot of work in this space, including through the “Know Your Neighbor” campaign that they run that's pre-pandemic but has been adapted to the pandemic setting to bring people together to talk and work together on issues of shared concern. So one of the things that I think has been a great fruit of the effort has been a powerful reaffirmation of pluralism and respect across differences and affirmation of the principles of our country that out of many weeks can be won. And so that's been a real shot in the arm if you wouldn't mind me saying so.   OPERATOR:  We will take the next live question from Laura Alexander, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Please accept the unmute now prompt.   Okay, we will take the next written question from Kevin McBride of Raymond Baptist Church.    “How do we heal the division within the faith communities as we move forward between those who stand against the vaccines and those who have participated?”   KIM:  Well, one of the things that I would begin, just by saying, and then I'd love to hear from both Jacqui and Melissa, but is to acknowledge that there are divisions, I mean, there's no way to address this issue if we don't acknowledge this issue. But I would have to say, let's acknowledge it and try to understand the deeper reasons behind it. And not simply to characterize or attribute motivations before we actually have real conversations and address those concerns. It's very easy to assume that a person's motivation is the worst possible motivation when that person happens to disagree with you. And we tend to give ourselves the latitude of nuance in our position. But we tend to afford simplistic motivations to others. So I think one of the ways that we are going to go about healing this, is that even understanding that two people who say the same thing may have very different reasons for why they say it. But you're only going to get that if you have these difficult conversations. If you dignify the other person with the basic assumption, they probably have nuance to why they're doing it. Emotional, intellectual, spiritual motivations, cultural context. And if we're to heal that division that exists, we're going to need to enter into an understanding. And that just takes work. And we're frankly, all tired. So it's a lot easier to just characterize and move on. But the kind of labor that's required to see the pandemic finish is the kind of labor that's going to be required to move on in healing our nation in all sorts of other ways.   LEWIS:  I think that's really beautiful, Walter. And I would say, friends, that building a relationship is difficult work. It's really difficult work. And so, if we want that, if we want to be a part of the healing, I think we need to build relationships. It might be that you decide to, I'm talking, I'm going to say this better. Talking about developing a sense of your own border personality. Put yourself on the border, read news that you don't usually consume, listen to music you don't usually listen to, turn on that other news channel and listen to what other folks are saying there. Broaden your inner border self. W. E. B. Du Bois used to say that Black people have two nests, that were double conscious, or double consciousness of our own consciousness and white consciousness. I think all of us need to be doubly conscious or maybe triply conscious. How can I develop a sensibility to understand a particular friend’s perspective? Let's just start there. I want to know that friend, that Chinese one, that Japanese friend, or that friend from the Dominican Republic who has a different sensibility than the one from Puerto Rico. Dip into the ethnicity of our white friends. They're not white. They think they are white, but they're also Polish, and German, and English, and Dutch. What do those ethnicities bring to the table? What does it mean to be Muslim in America? What is Ramadan? What's the conflict in Palestine-Israel about? Let's be students of the world, students of each other's culture, as a way to build bridges.   ROGERS:  I would so much agree with all of that and I think it's bound up in this is the importance of recognizing that people, everybody is carrying around a certain amount of pain, and perhaps a certain amount of fear. And to remember that sometimes people, they get exhausted, and they get exhausted by information overload, by the stresses in their lives. And  so  faith communities are so good at their best, at  taking a compassionate approach and recognizing dignity in everyone, and the pain that people carry and trying to take an empathetic approach to people's pain and suffering, and to try to have those great conversations that you've all just described.   KIM:  Thank you. I think, looking at the clock now, I realize that we're going to need to draw this to a conclusion. I know there are fantastic questions that are still in the Q&A and hopefully we'll find ways of being able to address those in other contexts. I would like for us, as we draw to a conclusion, for each of you to provide a brief main takeaway from this. What is a final thought, or an encouragement, or exhortation that you would leave with us?   ROGERS:  Great. So I would say that when I reflect on the situation we're in, it reminds me that sometimes, tragically, we can't stop pain and suffering sometimes. And that is such a terrible thing when that happens. But thankfully, that is not the case here. There is this vaccine that is safe, effective, convenient, and free. And so it's this wonderful opportunity for us to be able to stop pain and suffering. And so I know that we all know that, and are committed to that. And I think that what we need to do is recognize that there is a difference that we can make in these coming weeks, for the betterment of our neighbors, and our nation, and our world. And so I would just encourage everyone to ask  what they can do, whether it's posting on social media, joining this Digital Day of Action this Friday, becoming a member of the COVID Community Corps, take, if you haven't already, I would encourage you to take one of those steps. And if you have, take them again, please, and get your neighbors and your friends to do so, because this is a grassroots movement. And the way that we will win is by all of us getting off the sidelines and getting active in this fight, which is all of our fights together. And I feel very optimistic and hopeful. And I just want to thank everybody for their tremendous contributions to this work.   LEWIS:  That's beautiful, Melissa. I think I might add, agreeing with everything you're saying, I might add, we are, what is being revealed about us as human beings right now, in this COVID time, is just how much we can do together. That we got to a vaccine this fast, that we got to an effective vaccine that's working this fast, is amazing, miraculous. All the people who are caring for their neighbors, all the people who are doing love out loud as justice, both in the way the pandemic has affected us but also, I'm going call the second pandemic of racism—those pandemics are being addressed medically, sociologically, theologically, and with love, and you also are a love warrior. So wherever you are, remember that you are the best testimony to your neighbor, to your grandmother, to your son, that this can work. So get your shot, read up what you can on all things vaccine. But also, let's become, let's lean into an anti-racist culture. Because we study, listen for, hear the stories of our neighbors, and see how much we are alike, and how much we can heal together.   KIM:  Thank you so much for sharing your perspectives. Thank you for the questions that have been brought in. Thank you for the earlier presentations. I've really enjoyed this conversation. It's so promising, not only with respect to drawing COVID-19 to a close, but it's very promising for the future challenges that remain. That the kind of information and collaboration, the lessons learned, the relationships built. This notion that as a nation, multifaceted problems require multifaceted responses, and that we need to be in this together is something that bodes well, even as the challenges are profound and real. Thank you, Jacqui. Thank you, Melissa, for this amazing conversation.

JENKINS: Hello. Welcome, again, to the second day of the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy Workshop. I am Jack Jenkins, national reporter with Religion News Service here in Washington, D.C., where I cover the intersection of religion and politics as well as Catholicism. And the overlap has been significant in recent days. And I am delighted to be moderating today’s conversation with Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Cardinal Dolan is the current archbishop of New York. He was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Louis in 1976. Pope Benedict transferred him to the Archdiocese of New York in 2009, and named him a cardinal in 2012. And Cardinal Dolan entered the conclave that elected Pope Francis in 2013. And he joins us here this morning. Good morning, Cardinal Dolan. DOLAN: Jack, good morning to you and all our gracious listeners. It’s an honor and a joy to be with you. Thanks for the invite. JENKINS: Thanks so much. So I’ll just lead out with a question. So the biggest foreign policy headlines in recent weeks have involved the ongoing conflict in Israel-Palestine, where violence has continued to ramp up. Shortly before we began this session, news broke that President Biden has called for de-escalation in that region. Now, the region, of course, is a place that is of profound religious significance to at least three major world faiths. And I’m curious from your perspective, what is the role of the Vatican in particular, and the Catholic Church broadly, in terms of responding to this conflict? Because, obviously, there are foreign policy things at stake here, as well as domestic demonstrations happening right now here in the United States. So what is the Vatican and the church’s appropriate response and role in this moment? DOLAN: Well, thanks for asking, Jack. Yeah, the turmoil in the Holy Land, in Israel and Palestine, boy, that’s not new. And for those of us who are interested in foreign relations—and I salute the Council on Foreign Relations for their constant vigilance on this extraordinarily timely topic. It shows us how perennial conflicts are—that conflicts, unfortunately, are at the heart of the human project. Also at the heart of the human project is the ardent desire for peace. And of course, the Holy See—which is kind of the technical name for the Vatican—the Holy See would always be promoting that. The church—the Vatican, the Holy See—has always taken a special solicitude for the Holy Land. You hinted at one of the reasons, Jack, is just because it’s the historical roots for the monotheistic religions of the world: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The Holy See—the Vatican—has been particularly solicitous in the Holy Land for a number of reasons. One, because it’s home to ancient Christian communities. Secondly, because they’re always concerned about the rights of people. And thirdly, because they know that, unfortunately, what happens in the Middle East—as the old saying goes, when the Middle East sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, and that means that there’s going to be implications throughout the world. In one way, the church’s position—the Holy See’s position—would be very basic and very fundamental. And it’s going to be the same, Jack and listeners, to any turmoil or conflict that you have in the world, namely that violence is never the answer. Violence always breeds more violence. What is always essential is to step back, have some reflection and circumspection, and then to go into dialogue. Now, those might sound like bromides from a Hallmark greeting card, but for the Holy See they are extraordinarily important. And the Holy See would say that words like “stepping back,” “prudence,” “distance,” “dialogue”—don’t tell me those are dreamy, cerebral ideals because they are extraordinarily practical. And they work where violence rarely, if ever works. I remember, Jack, when I was taking a course in world history in my high school years. And it was a great course taught by a wonderfully astute priest, and we were studying the Second World War. And he said,“now, tell me the main reason for the Second World War,” and we all tried to give the reasons that we had learned from our reading in the textbook and all. And he said, yeah, those are all reasons, but he said, the major reason for the Second World War was the First World War. It was the First World War that caused the second one. Now, there’s an example of how violence, of how war, of how bloodshed, of how vendettas only lead to more. So the church is always saying, whoa, hold on here. Yeah, I know tensions are high. I know that this is in your gut. I know that there’s a breeding sense of injustice, and tension, and apprehension. But let’s use our mind, and our hearts, and not just our gut. And let’s call for scaling back and getting together to talk. We, most of the time, think of the violence and upheaval in the holy land and in Israel, in the Mideast.  We—as I’m speaking with you people who are much more learned on topics of international affairs than I’ll ever be—we can’t escape the fact that progress has come when the sides have gotten together. I’m thinking of Jimmy Carter and the Camp David Accords. I’m thinking about all the times that leaders have come together. And simply put, that’s what Pope Francis, that’s what his predecessors, that’s what the church believes. The church has a box seat on what’s going on in the Middle East because of the ancient Christian communities, who would weigh in. And does that help, Jack, or is there a follow up that I can be more specific? JENKINS: Yeah. Just a quick follow up about that box seat. I’m curious. Given, as you noted, the duration of this conflict. And it’s not new. But I’m curious, does the Vatican have a particular voice and influence to offer in this moment, given the billion-or-so Catholics that are represented in that institution. I’m curious, is there a specific amount of clout that the Vatican and the church can—writ large—can exercise in this moment, that other nations or bodies might not have? DOLAN: I would hope so. And I think that they do. By the way, in 1979 I was a graduate student in church history. And I was able to—I had Christmas free for the first time ever. And the first time I figured I ever would again, as a priest. And I went to Israel. I went to the Holy Land for Christmas, or at least we had the trip planned. And all of a sudden, come November, there was tension. There was some bloodshed. There was some upheaval. So I called the pilgrimage director. And I said, “well, I guess we better not go because there’s tension and conflict.” And he said, “look, if people only went to Israel when there was not tension and conflict nobody could ever go, because it’s been that way throughout history.” Yeah, the church would have a particular voice in a number of ways. Number one, there is a nuncio there.  The nuncio is the fancy word that the Holy See or the Vatican uses for its ambassadors—one who announces, an ambassador. And the nuncio, the Holy See’s ambassador to Israel, has always had a central role. Secondly, the leaders of the ancient religions there, they would all have some historical headquarters. And those religious leaders—I’m thinking of the patriarch of Jerusalem. I’m thinking about the Maronite archbishop, the—and pardon me for using all these fancy words. I hope nobody asks me to explain them because I don’t know if I can. But all the different groupings of the ancient Christian communities would be here. And they would have a loud voice. And thirdly, both parties historically, very much look to the Holy See for some type of moral approbation. So both the Palestinians and Israel are eager always to kind of explain themselves and seek the counsel of the Holy See. You would know in history that the state of Israel was eager, eager, eager always to have diplomatic relations with the Holy See. That didn’t come until the time of Pope St. John Paul II, if I’m not mistaken, in 1993. As the Palestinians were always eager for diplomatic relations. So they’re kind of sensitive to the moral authority of the church in world affairs. And I would like to think that that would give the church, the faith communities, a particularly significant role in brokering any type of advance in peace. JENKINS: I see. I see. Now, on that topic of kind of the moral authority, I mean, obviously world leaders are the chief arbiters of foreign policy. And Catholic leaders routinely dialogue with world leaders on issues the church cares about. Most recently, we’ve seen Pope Francis speak vocally about the plight of refugees, immigrants, the threat of climate change. John Kerry, in his capacity as the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, met with the pope over the weekend—again, kind of dialoguing about these issues.  Now of course the church has also taken a firm stance opposing abortion, which is an issue that has both domestic policy implications and foreign policy implications here in the United States, such as the so-called Mexico City policy, which members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have vocally supported in the past. So there has been a debate recently among your fellow bishops over whether or not to deny Catholic politicians, such as President Joe Biden, communion if they back policies that support abortion rights.  Now, you said back in 2019 that that’s not necessarily something you would want to have done back when there were reports that then-candidate Joe Biden was denied communion in South Carolina by a priest. But I’m curious, do you still hold that position now? And would you support—do you have any thoughts on this potential for drafting a document in the upcoming bishop’s meeting about this precise issue? And then the attached question to that is, is this what it looks like when the church tries to exert moral authority on moral questions to world leaders, both here in the United States and abroad? DOLAN: Yeah. Yeah, way to go, Jack. I had mentioned to you that the Holy See always prefers dialogue, conversation, reasonable approach to things when it comes to international tension. That, by the way, is the church’s preference when it comes to intermural difficulties. You just raised one of them. So the Holy See recently wrote to us, bishops in the United States, and said: Hey, it’s good you’re worried about this issue. Let’s keep in mind that always the best approach is, before you get into sanctions or discipline, is always to have dialogue, OK? So we preach to ourselves as well as to others. It’s interesting you bring up, Jack, moral authority. Some people might be tempted to say, whoa, wait a minute, morality doesn’t have, shouldn’t have much to do in international diplomacy and foreign affairs. The people on this call know better, don’t they? Diplomacy at its core is a moral enterprise, insofar as it is based on such virtues as trust and honor, the reliability of one’s word, a concern not only about one’s self, but the common good. Those are all moral principles upon which fruitful diplomacy and foreign relations are built, OK? Most of the time we come into tension, as we’ve got now with the issue at hand in the Mideast, is because of why? A lack of trust on both sides. That’s a moral problem, OK? That’s just not an earthly problem. That happens to be a spiritual and emotional problem, a conflict of the heart. And from the middle of the fourth century, as you all would know in your history of foreign affairs, the Holy See, the Vatican, the central government of the Catholic Church, has always been looked upon as a player in foreign relations because it does have a particularly compelling moral voice. We’re not the only faith that does, that’s for sure. Thank God there’s a whole array of voices in it. But the Holy See—and that’s why since the middle of the fourth century the Vatican, Rome, the Holy See has sent and received diplomats. Because world powers would appreciate the role—the moral authority that the Holy See uniquely has.  We have no troops to send. We have no currency to float. We have no borders to protect. We have no arms to trade, OK? Our only coinage, Jack, is in the moral and spiritual realm. But that’s not to be dismissed. When that is dismissed is when we get into hot water, as is going now. That’s why the holy father would constantly call both sides: Slow down. Ease up a little. Let’s get together and talk. And, by the way, if I can be a partner in bringing sides together, let me know. As often the Holy See is. Remember, as often the Vatican is. More often than not, behind the scenes. Diplomacy by its nature is heavy on discretion, OK? And the Holy See is sort of an expert on discretion. JENKINS: Got it. And just to make sure that you address the first part of my question, do you have any specific remarks about this dialogue about denying communion? And do you still hold your same position as you did in 2019 saying that you personally wouldn’t do this to then-candidate Biden or now President Biden? DOLAN: Yeah, I would have welcomed the Holy See’s counsel to us recently. This is a timely moment for us as teachers, us bishops in the United States, to issue a clear teaching on what we believe about the holy Eucharist, and what is necessary for a worthy reception of holy communion. That’s a challenge to all of us, not any particular politician. So I think the church’s role is to teach, and then in dialogue with individual politicians who profess the Catholic faith would ask for guidance. That’s where we would come in. So you quoting me in 2019? That would probably be my position today, yeah. JENKINS: Got it. And I have a couple more questions if we can get through them. One is just, one of the realities of foreign policy is that sometimes domestic policy can influence foreign policy. So for instance, the struggle for racial equality here in the United States has been noted by other nations as calling into question the moral high ground that the United States sometimes claims in conversations around human rights. And racial justice has also been a topic within the Catholic Church. You know, the USCCB has dedicated resources to it and Pope Francis has even mentioned demonstrations that happened here in the United States around racial justice recently. And so with that in mind, how can the Catholic Church—which activists noted has been among the myriad of faith communities that were complicit in perpetuating slavery and other forms of White supremacy throughout American history—how does the church help this country reckon with that past and create a future that embraces racial justice in order to help further the foreign policy goals that the United States and the Catholic Church have put forward? DOLAN: What your good question is predicated upon, Jack, is the importance of credibility when it comes to foreign affairs and diplomatic initiatives. One has to have a certain amount of credibility, especially if you’re talking about morality, which the Holy See does. That’s our cache. And part of that morality is to admit that we don’t often practice what we preach. So very often a contrite posture that, hey, we’re going to hold up the values, we’re going to hold up the principles. We’d like to think that more often than not we’ve been a good example of showing those in the past. But we got to let you know that we’re also painfully aware that there have been examples in the past where we ourselves have been guilty of the atrocities that now we warn against in the world, and that we ourselves haven’t been the best in living up to. So that bluntness, that candor, I think, is always important in the life of the church. So when it comes to racism—I remember very well, Jack, over the summer we had a most enlightening and an extraordinarily blunt Zoom call with our priests and deacons, religious women and men leaders in the diocese, on the question of racism. And that came up, that we had some people painfully speak about their personal wounds of racism, even within the family of the church in the past. Thanks be to God even more people spoke about how the church was a light to the world, as Jesus asks us to be, in speaking about racial justice. You have to remember, everything the church does is based on those two pillars: of the dignity of the human person made in the image and the likeness of God, OK. And number two, the sanctity of all human life. Those are the two pillars. And every time we preach them. and preach them we must even in the realm of foreign affairs, we also have to do a mea culpa in saying, hey folks, sometimes we learn the hard of the horror and the trauma of not living up and defending those two pillars. Maybe that give us a bit more credibility. Can I give you an example, Jack? JENKINS: Sure. DOLAN: What am I asking you for? I would have done it anyway. (Laughter.) You know, the church, the Vatican, and its central teaching has a checkered history in the defense of religious freedom, all right? So there would have been kind of the drift of the church’s teaching through the centuries that the one true religion—for us, Catholicism—should have a privileged posture in the common good, in society, OK? Gradually the church changed in that, OK? Led, if I might say so, by dah-dah, the United States of America. So when we have our First Amendment, when we had the separate of church and state, when we came across as the champion of religious freedom throughout the world, at first the Holy See said, oh, we don’t know about this separation of church and state because the union of throne and altar was always such a part of history, especially in Europe.  But gradually they came to see, this is the providential way, in such a way that at the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965, through the leadership of the American bishops, the highest teaching authority in the church, an ecumenical council, issued a document on religious freedom that today by diplomatic entities is looked upon as one of the foundations of civilization’s providential protection of that first and most cherished freedom: religious freedom. So I get—I only mention that as an example of how sometimes we have learned by our mistakes. And we don’t serve anybody well if we hide those mistakes and don’t admit them. And say well sort of what Jesus said about some teachers. He said, do what they say, don’t do what they do, OK? JENKINS: Right. Well, and one last question before we turn it over to the audience. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic, a foreign policy conundrum if there ever was one. And, as you noted, the Vatican, the church, isn’t going to send armies of that variety. But they are present in places around the planet in a way that is not true with most other global institutions. And so the Vatican has been involved in several debates involving the pandemic, most recently calling for vaccine patents to be loosened so they can be more widely distributed to the planet, something the Biden administration has since endorsed. And I’m curious—and I apologize for the unfairly broad nature of this question given how all-encompassing the pandemic is. But what is the role of the Catholic Church moving forward as it looks like many Western nations are deeply vaccinating their people and their citizens and now trying to distribute those vaccines elsewhere where other countries might have to grapple with this pandemic for months, if not years, beyond this present point? What is the role of the Catholic Church and the Vatican, looking forward to the future of the repercussions of this pandemic? DOLAN: A high and necessary role, a trust. You are right in saying that one of the traditional ways, one of the traditional reasons that the powers of the world look to the church, to the Holy See, for some type of guidance or help when it comes to global problems is because we do happen to have outposts in every nation of the world. The very word “catholic” means “everywhere,” OK? We’re everywhere. So the church is always on the ground. And we always got our ear to the ground about the trials and the tribulations that people are going through. So we like to think we can bring that experience to global conversations. Again, the church’s sensitivity to the global pandemic is obvious. And it stems from what I just mentioned before, Jack, our dual responsibility of the dignity of the human person, made in God’s image and likeness, particularly when that’s threatened, and the sanctity of all human life. Now, the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of life has been extraordinarily, graphically affected by the global pandemic. So no wonder the Holy See has had something to say about it, and will continue to. However, you used a word earlier, Jack, that usually we try to stay away from, but it might be applied here. You spoke about the clout of the Vatican. I don’t know if, we can’t claim any earthly clout. We can claim a spiritual clout. And so the greatest service that the Holy See can provide is spiritual. And I have not heard anybody deny that this has, this pandemic, yes, it’s affected the lungs. Yes, it’s affected the body. But it has also affected the soul. And that there has been a planetary, almost, rediscovery of the power of the within, the power of the soul, and the spirit, and the human person. And of course, the Holy See will speak to that. So I look, for instance, here in the Archdiocese of New York, have the parishes, I could speak about the way the parishes, and Catholic Charities, and ArchCare have been extraordinarily robust in helping to bring about the vaccines in our pop-up food pantries and the help that we’re trying to get to the poor who are overly burdened during the crisis, in our nursing homes, in our hospitals. Yeah, I can talk about all of that. Primarily what I hope we’ve been most salutary in, is in our attention to the soul. To try to help people get focus and meaning in all of this suffering. Would you ever forget, it was almost, well, it was the end of March last year. So it was right after the global pandemic was kind of recognized by the entire world, when Pope Francis did that outdoor service in the rain in an empty St. Peter’s Square. JENKINS: Right. DOLAN: He was there, standing alone in an empty St. Peter’s Square, addressing the world. I’m told by my friends in the media that that was extraordinarily soothing and helpful to the world to use, if you might remember, the passage in the Bible about the terrible storm that happened in Galilee and with the apostles in the boat thinking they were going to sink. And they look to Jesus for help, and he was snoring. He was asleep. And he spoke very, Pope Francis, to an empty square with literally tens and tens of millions of people listening. He spoke about the temptation today is to think that God is asleep. That he’s not in charge. That he’s not taking care of us. That he’s not going to get us through this. That, Jack, is the church at her best. That is where the church has its most clout, to use your word. Without for a moment deemphasizing the extraordinary humanitarian charitable and health-care work that the church has done, and the moral chiding sometimes that the holy father has done about the necessity of sharing the virus, the necessity of not tying it to the ability to pay, the necessity of making sure that the poor are on par with everybody else in having access to this. JENKINS: Thank you for that. And I could ask you questions all day (laughs), but I do want to give our audience the opportunity to do so as well. So at this time I would like to invite participants to join our conversation with questions. We’ll do our best to get through as many as possible. I think I turn it over to the CFR folks for that. OPERATOR: Thank you. (Gives queuing instructions.) We’ll take the first live question from Burton Visotzky at Jewish Theological Seminary. Please unmute. VISOTZKY: Thank you. Can you all hear me? DOLAN: You bet we can Burton. VISOTZKY: Your eminence, it’s— DOLAN: It’s good to have a friend and a neighbor asking the first question. VISOTZKY: Excellent. Yes. I want to ask you a particular question in light of Pope Francis’s unprecedented outreach to the Muslim community. He visited Abu Dhabi in 2019 and his encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” which was magnificent, was really in large measure addressed to relations with the Muslim community. That is a sea change in Catholic-Islamic relations over almost two thousand years, well, fifteen hundred years. I want to ask: How will this affect your own interfaith outreach to the Muslims in New York? DOLAN: Yeah. Burton, thanks for the question. By the way, you did very well, “Fratelli Tutti.” You had a great Italian pronunciation. Had a little bit of a Hebrew twang to it. But you did very well, Burton. Way to go. It’ll have an epic impact on us. It’ll have an epic impact. I’m glad you brought it up, because this is exhibit A of the church’s posture to everything. It’s much better to talk, to sit down. It’s better to embrace hands than have them in a fist. And we have to do that, especially as religious leaders. Pope Francis has been phenomenally active in this. And I would say, Burton, it’s based on both a pragmatic and a theoretical reason. The theoretical reason is simply because of the compunction of what the Islamic, the Jewish, and the Christian community believe, that trust and respect for the human person is primary in our approach to life and to other people. It’s pragmatic in that we can’t keep going on like we are. And if religion can’t show the way of getting together, how can we expect the people of the world to do it? So it’s also very pragmatic. Pope Francis, by the way, Burton, has not been a dreamer here. He’s also been pretty blunt in reminding us on the one hand that Islam at its core is a religion of respect with a thirst for peace, but that, like the rest of us, its adherents might not always live up to that. So he has also been a little bit, what shall I say? A little bit blunt with his friends in the Islamic community to say: Please help us in reminding those radical elements that don’t live up to the noble virtues of Islam, remind them that they are at odds with what Islam teaches. In other words, he wants to, he says to his Islamic sisters and brothers: You tell us you want to be on the side of peace and reconciliation. And we firmly believe that you do. You need then to bring all of your, all of these people together in being, in condemning the examples of violence and harshness that sometimes we see within your community, like we all see within our communities, people who are not living up to it.  So, Burton, now something tells me you will agree with me very much that here in New York we’ve got a leg up. Because I would think it’d be tough to find another city in the world where religious, interreligious amity, friendship, concord, is so practiced. New York is a laboratory for people getting along. I remember a couple of years ago we had a cardinal from the Vatican who was in the Jewish-Catholic dialogue. And he came and he was visiting a synagogue. And when he was waiting to go in for his address, he was reading the bulletin board. And he saw a notice on the bulletin board saying: Listen, everybody, as you know, the Islamic Mosque three blocks away suffered a fire recently. And they’ve had to close for repairs. In the meantime, we’ve invited them to have their Sabbath services here. Now, the cardinal from the Vatican when he was telling me that had tears in his eyes. He said: I don’t know if there’s another place in the world where you could have, where you’d find a notice like that.  And so the good thing you and I have, Burton, is that we are grateful inheritors of a legacy of interreligious dialogue, and amity, and friendship that we can never take for granted, and upon which we need to build. And that now, the particular challenge is with the Islamic community. Why? Well, for one, because they’re kind of recently arrived. So they may not have been part of that heritage that we revel in. And number two, because tensions within world religions, whether it be Islamic, or Jewish, or Christian, is now such a part of the world arena. So to engage them is to an extraordinarily compelling motive for all of us involved, like you are, and like I’m honored to be, in interreligious dialogue here in New York. JENKINS: I think we can take another question. OPERATOR: Our next question is a written submission from Ellen Posman at Baldwin Wallace University. I appreciate the comments about moral authority and racial justice and admitting mistakes and maintaining credibility. How do you see those issues playing out for the church’s role on the issue of gender justice throughout the world? DOLAN: Yeah. Thank you, Ellen. That’s a very timely question. We, part of our Catholic tradition is always a distinction between who a person is and what a person might do. Who a person is, is non-negotiable for Catholics. No matter what ethnic background, no matter what race, no matter what gender identity, or sexual attraction, that person demands, deserves respect, reverence. And that’s part of Catholic teaching, OK?  Now while the Catholic Church might say some forms of behavior we would have questions about, what is non-negotiable is the inherent dignity of the human person, no matter—so, when I go, when I visit, well, when I visit a prison I ask to see, well, thank God, in this state, it’s not true in other states where I might visit prisons, I would ask to see the person who’s on death row. There would be people who would say, they have absolutely, they’ve lost any right to ask for dignity and respect. In our book, people who believe in the Bible, that’s just not true. Every person deserves dignity and respect. We, as Catholics, always hold up that ideal when it comes to any question. And even though, yes, we have the moral imperative to preach what we feel is a revealed truth about behavior, we also know it’s a revealed truth that the human person always, always, always deserves dignity and respect. And, you know, Ellen, and I admit that’s a difficult road to walk. And it’s one that one time we might err one side to the other. But, boy, we can never give up trying. JENKINS: I think we can take another question. OPERATOR: We’ll take the next live question from William O’Keefe at Catholic Relief Services. DOLAN: Ah! OPERATOR: Accept the unmute prompt. O’KEEFE: Good morning, Cardinal Dolan, and thank you so much— DOLAN: How are you, William? O’KEEFE: Yeah, I’m good. It’s a pleasure to see you. Thanks for all your work. DOLAN: I just had breakfast earlier this morning with a great benefactor of Catholic Relief Services. O’KEEFE: Well, thank you so much for doing that. We appreciate your support. You talked about the church’s work on fighting COVID, and the Vatican’s role. And I’m wondering about how you see bringing to life the holy father’s comments about trying to build back better. And to reverse some of the economic and political injustices that have been so exposed around the world. And, we at Catholic Relief Services, where I work, see this every day. I’d love to hear your reflections on what we can all do to try to advance that. DOLAN: Thanks, William. I hope our listeners don’t think this is a staged question because of my high esteem for Catholic Relief Services and the possibility to give you a shout out here with the Council for Foreign Relations. On the, pardon me, Jack, for going off-key for a minute. But three or four days after the horrific earthquake in Haiti in January of 2010, I had the honor back then, William, as you might remember, serving as chair of the board for Catholic Relief Services. And I was able to go down there to deliver medical supplies.  And as we landed at the airport, which was opened especially for relief airplanes like ourselves, who did I meet but the then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And we chatted for a little while in the airport hangar before I went into Port-au-Prince. And she said to me, I’m glad you’re here. She said, I’ve been here for a couple days. And she said, the people who seem to be doing the best would be your Catholic Relief Services, because we already had three hundred people who were there all the time. They were on the ground. They lived there. They worked there. And they were able to deliver supplies. So God bless Catholic Relief Services. You ask a good question, William. I mentioned earlier to Jack that this COVID crisis has triggered an internal, an introspection among everybody, who have had to kind of look deep down within for reason, for focus, for a sense of purpose. It’s been a time of trial, and suffering, and isolation. And those occasions usually trigger an internal reckoning. And I see that among a lot of our people. But that’s not just individually, personally. I also see an occasion for a communal, a national, a planetary examination of conscience. There’s a rediscovered sense of the brittleness of human life and of our health. We were kind of on a high for a while thinking, oh my God, we have one cure after another. And the scientists have everything under control. Scientists, by the way, would be the first to be humble and say no, we’re working hard at it but we don’t have everything under control. But COVID has taught us about our frailty, about our fragility. I see it here in the city. I see it here in the state. I see it here in the nation. And I see it abroad. Everybody now is beginning to ask themselves how we as a people, part of this village that we call the human race and the planet that we call Earth, how this kind of newly rediscovered fragility can give rise to a more poignant sense of solicitude for the poor and vulnerable of the world. The inequities that may have caused the virus to spread much more aggressively in minorities, in underprivileged areas where healthcare is not available. This, I trust, and I’m not surprised; I’m very proud of him, that Pope Francis would be one of the leading voices in this, is, I trust, leading to a cosmopolitan examination of conscience about what we can learn from all of this. JENKINS: So I think we have time for one more question. OPERATOR:  The final question is a written submission from Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons at the Center for American Progress. Climate envoy John Kerry just met with Pope Francis at the Vatican. What areas of overlap do you see between the Biden administration’s priorities and Catholic social teaching where you can partner? DOLAN: Even more than just on climate change, but that’s the one that you particularly mentioned. And I wasn’t surprised at all to see that the holy father received John Kerry, and that both gave glowing statements. Pope Francis has been an early advocate of a crescendo of sensitivity to the fragility of the planet. By the way, so has the Greek Orthodox, Bartholomew, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Constantinople, or as you all call it, Istanbul, all right? He also has been an early prophet of climate. And Pope Francis has become one of the leading advocates. So that he would find a mutuality of concern with the administration does not surprise me at all. The Holy See is always eager to cooperate with world leaders. They don’t agree on everything, OK? I can remember when Pope Paul VI, I was a student in Rome, a seminarian, when Pope Paul VI met with Idi Amin. Now they didn’t have much in common, folks, but Pope Paul said, look, if I can try to talk some sense into this guy, if I can try to bring out some of the good that I believe is deep down within, I’m going to give it a shot, because we don’t have much to lose. So the church is always ready to meet with leaders, even when we know that we’ll agree with them and disagree with them. I say that, I presume there’s going to be areas of tension between the church and the Biden administration, as there has been with every president, OK? The Holy See usually looks on the bright side and says, hey, let’s make hay while the sun shines. Or, to use the Italian expression, you got to make gnocchi with the dough you got, OK? So let’s find some areas where we can work on, and then maybe we can bring about a conversation of heart on the areas where we disagree. That’s pretty much true with all world leaders. So I’m not surprised at all to see Pope Francis and Secretary Kerry sit down and make some progress on climate, on the sensitivity towards the crisis of the environment. And I would anticipate there would probably be some agreements where, some areas where there might be some disagreements. JENKINS: Got it. Well, I think that is all the time we have. DOLAN: Aw, shucks. JENKINS: (Laughs) I want to thank Cardinal Dolan for being a part of this conversation and the Council on Foreign Relations for hosting it. This has been a wide-ranging discussion. I’m sure we have many more questions. But thank you again, all of you who watched, for joining us on this Wednesday. DOLAN: Thanks for letting me in, folks. Thank you. (END)